Thinking Allegory Otherwise 9780804773508

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Thinking Allegory Otherwise

Thinking Allegory Otherwise

Edited by Brenda Machosky

stanford university press stanford, california

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. This book has been published with the assistance of The Stanford Fund, The Office of the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, and The School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. Essay One was originally published in boundary2, volume 3, no. 1 (Spring). Copyright, Duke University Press. Reprinted with permission. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thinking allegory otherwise / edited by Brenda Machosky.    p. cm.   Originates from a conference held at Stanford University in February 2005.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-8047-6380-6 (cloth : alk. paper)   1. Allegory—Congresses.  I. Machosky, Brenda.   PN56.A5T49 2010   809'.915—dc22 2009028684 Typeset by Thompson Type in 11/14 Adobe Garamond.

Contents

Acknowledgments

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Contributors

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Introduction “A Protean Device” brenda machosky

1



Allegory without Ideas angus j. s. fletcher

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1.

part one

performing allegory



2.

Memories and Allegories of the Death Penalty Back to the Medieval Future? jody enders

37



3.

The Mask of Copernicus and the Mark of the Compass Bruno, Galileo, and the Ontology of the Page daniel selcer

60



4.

The Function of Allegory in Baroque Tragic Drama What Benjamin Got Wrong blair hoxby

87

part two

allegory in place



5.

Colonial Allegories in Paris The Ideology of Primitive Art gordon teskey

119



6.

Monuments and Space as Allegory Town Planning Proposals in Eighteenth-Century Paris richard wittman

142

vi

contents

part three

revisiting allegory in the renaissance



7.

Allegory and Female Agency maureen quilligan

163



8.

What Knights Really Want stephen orgel

188



9.

Eliding Absence and Regaining Presence The Materialist Allegory of Good and Evil in Bacon’s Fables and Milton’s Epic catherine gimelli martin

208

part four

new dimensions for allegory



10.

On Vitality, Figurality, and Orality in Hannah Arendt karen feldman

237



11.

Allegory and Science From Euclid to the Search for Fundamental Structures in Modern Physics james j. paxson

249

Index

265

Acknowledgments

A collection such as this depends on the good will of many people and the generous support of many others. This collection is the sequel to a conference of the same name. Stanford University President John Hennessy provided financial support for the conference and this publication through The Stanford Fund. Generous funding was also provided by John Bravman, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, and Arnold Rampersad, Cognizant Dean of the Humanities. In the Office of the President, I would like to thank Jeffrey Wachtel, Senior Assistant to the President, for his support of this project. The Stanford Humanities Center, then under the direction of John Bender, provided an intellectually pleasant atmosphere for the original conference. My colleagues, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Robert Harrison, encouraged this project and helped bring it to fruition. At Stanford University, this project has also received support from the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages; the Departments of French and Italian, Comparative Literature, and English; The Philosophical Reading Group; The Program in Continuing Studies; The Introduction to the Humanities Program; and Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities. The conference and this book would not have proceeded so smoothly without the help of Monica Moore, Ruth Kaplan, and Ryan Zurowski. Thanks also to the reviewers, including Bruce T. Clarke, who provided insightful comments on the final organization and production of this collection. I am particularly grateful to Norris Pope and the editorial staff at Stanford University Press, who have provided kind and helpful guidance through this process. I owe especial thanks to the contributors of the volume. These scholars have made my editing job easy and pleasant. I appreciate their patience with me, their enthusiasm for this work, and their continued commitment to thinking allegory otherwise.

Contributors

j o d y e n d e r s is a past editor of Theatre Survey and is the author of numerous articles and four books on the interplay of rhetoric, literature, performance theory, law, and the theatrical culture of the European Middle Ages, among them Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends (Chicago, 2002, and winner of the Barnard Hewitt Award) and Murder by Accident: Medieval Theater, Modern Media, Critical Intentions (Chicago, 2009). She is Professor of French and Theater at the University of California, Santa Barbara. a n g u s f l e t c h e r is Distinguished Professor Emeritus, CUNY Graduate School. Author of several books and articles on literary theory and history, he published A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, Environment, and the Future of Imagination (Harvard, 2004), which won the Truman Capote Prize. In 2007, Harvard published his book, Time, Space and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare. In 2008, he served as J. Paul Getty Research Professor, Los Angeles. Currently he is finishing a book on change and complexity as these occur in the arts and sciences, particularly focusing on the works of Joseph Conrad, Thomas Mann, Karel Capek, and J. G. Ballard. b l a i r h o x b y, Associate Professor of English at Stanford University, is the author of Mammon’s Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton (Yale, 2002). His recent research has focused on early modern tragedy, opera, and allegorical drama. His forthcoming Spectacles of the Gods: Tragedy and Tragic Opera, 1550–1780 reconstructs a set of deep assumptions and performance practices that cross national boundaries and makes the early modern period a distinct and meaningful time-section in the history of theater.

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contr ibutor s

k a r e n s . f e l d m a n is Assistant Professor of German at University of California, Berkeley. Her book, Binding Words: Conscience and Rhetoric in Hobbes, Hegel and Heidegger, appeared with Northwestern in 2006. She has also published articles on philosophy and literary theory in Journal of the History of Ideas, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Word & Image, and Angelaki. b r e n d a m a c h o s k y is an Assistant Professor of English at University of Hawaii West Oahu, where she teaches English, world literature, and drama. Her book Faces of Allegory is forthcoming with Fordham. She has published articles on allegory and literary theory in SEL, Exemplaria, and Comparative Literature Studies. Her current research focuses on allegory in postcolonial literature and other unusual places. c a t h e r i n e g i m e l l i m a r t i n teaches Renaissance literature at the University of Memphis. Her major publications include The Ruins of Allegory: “Paradise Lost” and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention (Duke, 1998; James Holly Hanford Award winner, 1999); Francis Bacon and the Refiguring of Early Modern Thought (coedited with Julie Solomon, Ashgate, 2005), and Milton and Gender (Cambridge, 2004). She has also published numerous essays on early modern literature, science, and politics. s t e p h e n o r g e l is the J. E. Reynolds Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University. His most recent books are Imagining Shakespeare (Palgrave, 2003), and The Authentic Shakespeare (Routledge, 2002). He has ­edited The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale in the Oxford Shakespeare and is the general editor, with A. R. Braunmuller, of the new Pelican Shakespeare. j a m e s j . p a x s o n, Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida, is the author of The Poetics of Personification. He continues to work on the history and function of rhetorical “master tropes” in poetics and an account of cosmology for the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Literature and Science. He is an editor of Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. m a u r e e n q u i l l i g a n is the R. Florence Brinkley Professor of English at Duke University and former department chair. She is the author of books on allegory, on Spenser and Milton, and on writing by women in

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the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. She is currently at work on a book about royal female authority in sixteenth-century Britain and France. d a n i e l s e l c e r is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University, where he specializes in early modern thought, connections between philosophy and rhetoric, and French poststructuralism. He is the author of Philosophy and the Book: Early Modern Figures of Material Inscription, forthcoming with Continuum Books (2010). g o r d o n t e s k e y is Professor of English at Harvard University. He is author of Allegory and Violence (Cornell, 1996) and of Delirous Milton (Harvard, 2006), which won the Milton Society of America’s James Holly Hanford award. Gordon Teskey is editor of the Norton edition of Paradise Lost. He is writing on Spenser and Milton, as usual. r i c h a r d w i t t m a n is Associate Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at UC Santa Barbara. His book, Architecture, Print Culture, and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France, was published by Routledge in 2007.

Introduction “A Protean Device” brenda machosky

Embedded in museum displays, providing the structure for scientific thought, underlying the legal system, evading the hegemony of the idea, allegory is thriving in the twenty-first century. The call to “think allegory otherwise” initially led to a stimulating academic conference at Stanford University in February 2005. Some of the usual suspects were present, but there were also new voices, young scholars and academic veterans who were willing (and eager) to consider their work in an allegorical mode. The final result is this collection of essays, and our hope is to inspire broader and deeper engagements with this “protean device,” as Angus Fletcher so aptly named it.1 Even though the work contained herein has evolved and changed substantially since the conference, the title of the conference has been retained because “thinking allegory otherwise” remains the best descriptor of this limitless project. Allegory is perhaps as old as language itself and certainly as variable as the languages and styles in which it has been written. The early readers of Homer allegorized the great epics. Philo of Alexandria adapted an allegorical system of interpretation for the Hebrew Bible. Augustine ­carefully

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explained the structure of allegory inherent in language. Aquinas differentiated the allegory of the theologians from the allegory of the poets. Dante countered Aquinas with a divine allegorical poem. In the medieval period, allegorical figures took the stage in mystery plays and pageants, adorned churches and monuments. De Lorris and De Meun, Chaucer, Tasso, Pizan—all produced fabulous works of allegory. Even during the Reformation, when icons were suspect, allegory maintained its presence. The Romantics tried to devalue allegory’s particular system of representation, preferring the presumed coincident signification of the symbol, but allegory persisted. Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man challenged the Romantic view, and allegory became a formidable force in literary theory of the twentieth century. And allegory also continues to receive uninterrupted attention in the study of medieval and early modern works. Between occasional pinnacles, allegory has maintained a constant presence in artistic forms and humanistic study. All on its own, allegory inspires great works of literature and insightful commentary. The powerful works of allegory can be so inspiring, in fact, that it is hard to wrest free of their influence. What person writing about allegory in English literature can avoid Spenser? In French, who can avoid Le Roman de la Rose? What allegorical theorist can ignore the Romantic judgment? This volume challenges such limits. Some of the greatest minds thinking about allegory in the past few decades were asked to think about it differently. And what of the great thinkers who haven’t really thought about allegory? These scholars were challenged to think otherwise just by thinking about allegory. The results harness the excitement of a conference in presenting a variety of topics, not restricted to historical period or generic mode, in offering experimental ideas, in posing complex questions, in provoking further discussion and inspiring new work. Angus Fletcher challenges the role of metaphysics in allegory by thinking about allegory without reference to ideas. Gordon Teskey reads the allegorical construction of colonialism and the ideology of the museum. Richard Wittman, an architectural historian boldly entering the fray, discovers allegorical structures in the architectural debates and broadsides of early modern Paris. Daniel Selcer reveals allegory in the performative aspects of diagrams in texts by Bruno and Galileo. Karen Feldman identifies an allegorical structure in philosophy by way of Hannah Arendt’s Life of the Mind. James Paxson explores the place of allegory in contemporary scientific discourse. Literary texts also receive new treatment in the essays by Maureen

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3

Quilligan (Christine de Pizan and Mary Wroth), Stephen Orgel (Spenser), Blair Hoxby (John Ford and Henry Purcell), and Catherine Gimelli Martin (Bacon and Milton). In the opening essay, Fletcher’s thinking primes us for a reconsideration of allegory in a variety of modes and serves as an apt introduction to the entire volume. Fletcher dives deeply into the problem of thinking allegory otherwise by thinking “Allegory without Ideas.”2 This seminal essay rethinks the allegorical tradition against what it has become and suggests a new “origin” with connections to ancient philosophy (Aristotle), medieval challenges to universalism (Ockham), and modern theories of nominalism (Quine). The essay is the sort of de/re/construction of which only a scholar of Fletcher’s erudite breadth and freely roaming thought is capable. In the first part, “Performing Allegory,” only one of the three essays focuses on theatrical production as such. The drama is but one form in which allegory takes the stage. With her extensive knowledge of medieval theater, Jody Enders turns to the performance of the law in medieval France and articulates the ways in which allegory was embedded in the performance of capital punishment. Enders argues that the death penalty, especially in its medieval performances, is a supremely allegorical event in which criminals become signs of themselves, simultaneously literal and allegorical. Death penalty victims, in staging their own death, allegorize themselves. And Enders does not leave her observations in the medieval past. She forces us to consider the significance of the modern tendency to hide the images of a justice that imposes death. True to the promise in her title, “Back to the Medieval Future,” Enders’s realizations about the performative executions of the past point out the darkened allegory that continues to haunt the practice of capital punishment in the present. In his essay on Galileo’s Massimi sistemi and Bruno’s La Cena de le Cenari, Daniel Selcer points out that performative allegory also plays a role in the written text. Selcer demonstrates that the drawing (or misdrawing) of Copernicus’s diagram within the dialogues of Galileo’s and Bruno’s texts is itself a staging that takes place on the surfaces of the pages themselves, “a materialization of natural contemplation.” Developing the implicit and explicit critiques and reconfigurations of allegory presented by both philosophers, Selcer shows that Galileo’s text advocates a “script” of “naturalized allegory” in which the book of the universe is written, while Bruno claims that the field of philosophical contemplation is the only one in which the extreme tendencies of allegorical language can be controlled. Empirical

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data and mathematical order are shown to constitute a series of figures with which meaningful scientific discourse will correspond. The book of nature receives the allegorical text otherwise limited by Galileo to the sacred book. The allegorical nature of nature requires its readers to read allegorically. For both Galileo and Bruno, the philosophical-scientific text is a performance of allegory in which the authors, the characters, and the readers must participate. Concluding the part on performance is Blair Hoxby’s revised theory of allegory in baroque tragic drama. Counter to the claims of Walter Benjamin that the Trauerspiel or “tragic drama” is a demonstration of mourning and melancholy distinctly different from “tragedy” that induces a response of mourning, Hoxby argues that “tragic drama” uses allegorical modes in tandem with dramatic mimesis to create an experience of mourning. He challenges and expands Benjamin’s notions of the genre by examining a conventionally “tragic drama,” The Broken Heart, replete with the accoutrements of death so characteristic of Benjamin’s view. However, through a detailed reading of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, Hoxby also shows how the trappings of mourning are not essential to the form. This theatrical experience reconnects these dramas to ritual practices and the origin of drama itself. Thus Hoxby aligns the experience of tragic drama with seventeenthcentury expectations about the pleasure of mourning. Allegory has also been performed in more concrete media, particularly in public buildings and monuments, where figures or other conventional images are designed to express meaning. In the next part, Gordon Teskey and Richard Wittman expand the thinking of allegory in these other spaces. Teskey’s study follows the Colonial Exhibition of 1931 through its ideological display and its current place in the recently opened Musée du Quai Branly. Teskey continues to acknowledge the violent capture of meaning constitutive of allegory, as thoroughly articulated in his book, Allegory and Violence. However, he also notes a fundamental change in the convention of allegory through the history of colonialism, as represented in the museum and in service of French nationalist ideology. Whereas the allegorical body has traditionally served to both bear and conceal meaning, in the modern context, especially (but not exclusively) of colonialism, the body bears its use value and serves to conceal an imperial ideology. Be it a diorama of “live natives” at work or the very locus of the exhibition in the working-class suburbs of Paris and the subsequent shifting frames of refer-

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ence into which such images are forced, in modernity work itself becomes the work of allegory. Likewise, Richard Wittman brings allegory into a new realm of consideration, the history of architecture. Wittman studies the architecture and city planning of eighteenth-century Paris—in practice and in writing. Most people are familiar with the allegories built into churches and other edifices through the time of the Renaissance. The Enlightenment mood of the eighteenth century, however, precluded complex allegorical figures and styles in favor of transparency and clarity. However, as conventional allegory disappeared from actual buildings, Wittman observes, it resurfaced in criticism of those buildings. Even more interesting, allegory became a determining feature in written proposals for buildings and monuments never intended to materialize. By means of a narrative discursive practice, allegory provided a way for architecture to express its meaning without a material edifice. In a way, allegory became the material of architectural theory. The Renaissance is an epoch that cannot escape allegorical consideration, and thus the third section revisits allegory in this important period. Whereas Wittman’s essay shows allegory as a means for an absolute abstraction from materiality, Maureen Quilligan’s contribution establishes a materiality in works where allegory seemed mostly abstraction. In rethinking allegory in the Renaissance, Quilligan returns to Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies and the way in which Pizan literalizes the metaphor of her literary work. With a close reading and reworking of Teskey’s argument in Allegory and Violence, Quilligan contributes a new and convincing argument in the long-standing discussion of the typically female gender of personifications and allegorical figures as materially and not merely metaphorically (or linguistically) gendered. In doing so, Quilligan also situates the female writers Christine de Pizan and Mary Wroth in a distinctive relationship against and within the patriarchal tradition of allegory. Stephen Orgel, like Quilligan, discovers the fact of female agency within the patriarchal situations of sex and power in chivalric literature and art. In Spenser, and in a series of courtly images, Orgel shows that it is the women who are more typically active and the men passive. By considering “What Knights Really Want,” Orgel thinks through allegory without writing about allegory. His essay is important for what it does not do. The essay does not construe knights as conventional allegorical signs. Knights, in general and as individuals, do not mean something else. Chivalry is likewise

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not a metaphor for some other ideal. However, in the figures of Spenser’s knights, and in the women they love, Orgel reads a profound “message” about the tension between illicit sex and idealized love that underlies the chivalric tradition. Through a combination of textual and visual analysis, Orgel realizes that sex in Spenser, and in chivalry in general, is not a masculine action but a feminine one. Catherine Gimelli Martin also revisits conventional views of Renaissance allegory and establishes a more complex understanding of the materiality of allegorical figures in Milton and Bacon. Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, and other modern theorists have shown how the status of knowledge changed radically in the seventeenth century. Martin’s essay, together with Hoxby’s on seventeenth-century tragic drama and Selcer’s on Galileo and Bruno, explores the changes in the allegorical mode as expressions of this epistemological shift. Martin continues to think through the implications for particular allegorical figures in Milton’s Paradise Lost and their ideological originals in Bacon’s Advancement of Learning. As Quilligan shows how female agency is as material as it is metaphorical in Renaissance allegory, Martin reminds us that allegorical significance depends not merely on an absent meaning but on a material presence as well. Each essay included here explores the significance of allegory’s presence in all language, in the very being of language as such. The presence of allegory, in even the most ostensibly objective and straightforward language of sciences, forces us to think differently about allegory as such and to reconsider its essential value not only in our own language and forms of knowledge but also in our very way of being. Indeed, this ontological question is the driving force of the project to think allegory otherwise, and the concluding section brings allegory into dialogue with modern philosophical and scientific concerns. Karen Feldman argues that, as a form of metaphysical language, allegory constitutes the conditions of thinking and philosophy. Like Fletcher, Feldman points out that allegory provides the means for “imageless thought” (or thinking without ideas). She traces how the process of metaphorization makes “imageless thought” possible because figurality bridges the “two worlds” so essential to much of Western philosophy, but she also shows that this is not necessarily a hierarchical relation. This realization in turn challenges the oft-accepted view of allegory as a hierarchy, one privileging the signified, the meaning, over the sign or the figure. Nonetheless, allegory remains a slippery device. Feldman shows that while Hannah Arendt brings out the allegory of uncertainty in the history

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of philosophy, she does not fully realize the allegory of uncertainty within her own thought on figuration. James Paxson concludes the volume with a challenge to the very realm that would seem most impervious to the threat of allegory, science. Paxson argues that most of the advancements in mathematical thinking, particularly in physics, depend on an implicit allegorical structure. He argues that by recognizing the role of allegory in scientific discourse and by not perceiving it as a “threat” to a scientific way of thinking, we may, in fact, gain a greater understanding of modern science. As Feldman demonstrated within philosophy, so Paxson argues that science itself will benefit by allowing for and realizing the presence of allegory in its theories and its evolution. The collection proves that there is no going back to the old, established ways of thinking about allegory. And yet, it also manifests a realization about allegory that we should have known all along. The standard definition for “allegory” is to say one thing and mean another. Allegory has always demanded that we think otherwise. While the contributors to this volume faced a challenge in thinking allegory otherwise, the resulting essays demonstrate the facility and flexibility that this “protean device” really has and the pervasive power that it exerts in all language, not merely in the explicitly figural language of poetry and art but, far more interestingly, in the literal language of architecture, nationalism, philosophy, science, and even in the literal language of art and literature. Those of us who work with allegory often feel defensive about the topic. There is a rumor, a perception, that allegory is passé, not as interesting as other modes of interpretation and theory. In fact, this collection, along with the books and articles and conferences about allegory that appear each year, proves that this perception really is just a rumor. The rumor perhaps reveals more about those who propagate it than about allegory as such. The rumor is perhaps an attempt to disempower an indisputable force in language of all kinds. Even in historical moments when it doesn’t receive pronounced attention, allegory has always continued its work. As part of its protean nature, allegory changes not only its form and its applications but even its name. Allegory is not always called allegory. This is what so many of the essays here prove. The thinking of allegory cannot be limited to the things that call themselves allegory. Self-identified allegory may provide clues about how allegory works; but, even then, as the essays that here revisit established allegories show, the ways of allegory challenge us to think otherwise. We hope that this volume will promote a continued

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conversation, a broader and deeper thinking of allegory. More than this, however, we hope that this collection will inspire more thinking otherwise, not only to think allegory otherwise, but that, in thinking allegory, thought will think itself in other ways. Notes 1.  Angus Fletcher, Allegory: Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1964), p.1. 2.  Angus Fletcher originally wrote this paper for a plenary session of the conference. The essay was first published in Boundary2 (Spring 2006) and has been reproduced here by permission of boundary 2.

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Allegory without Ideas a ngus j. s. fletcher

1 As Renaissance authors used to say, allegory is the captain of all rhetorical figures of speech, and we might ask, Is it a ship of fools or a dreadnought? Certainly this “figure of false semblaunt” commands a large percentage of the world’s symbolic activity, mainly because it permits the iconic rendering of power relations. Realism in fiction, history, and journalism may seek the inherent power connection of allegory, as we know from its structural properties, especially its demonic agency and cosmic range. The key to understanding how allegory works is to focus on its mode of agency, and here we find that from ancient times to the present, under varying guises, the demonic—not necessarily bad—is the embodiment of primordial agency; the daimons of Greek myth have a unique power to act without impediment, obeying a system of absolute, single-minded, purified intention. By This essay is reprinted, with slight revisions. See Angus Fletcher, “Allegory without Ideas,” in boundary2, volume 3, no. 1 (Spring), pp. 77–98. Copyright, Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher.

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radically simplifying purpose, the allegorist looks at life as if it were a game of getting and exploiting power. This confers on the method a vast general relevance, while other broad modalities do not have either this semiotic depth or this cultural—and significantly religious—usage. Even prophecy and typology in biblical interpretation lack the allegorical scope. If iconologies of power are the issue, it must follow that we cannot understand the languages of politics and their rhetoric until we understand the allegorical method. It makes no difference what particular political order is in place; the defining allegorical structures will operate and will convert to the new situation, whenever a major political or cultural change of manifold occurs. Let us for reference purposes consider a rough rhetorical definition: Allegory is a method of double meanings that organizes utterance (in any medium) according to its expression of analogical parallels between different networks of iconic likeness. In setting up its correspondences between a certain story, let’s say, and a set of meanings (the significatio of medieval exegesis), the method usually gives a vague impression of system. As rhetoricians ancient and modern perceived the process, a particular allegory will be either a composition or an interpretation based on a correspondence between images and agents (actions and the impressions they make) falling on one side of a wall of correspondence. Allegorical narratives, say a biblical parable or an Aesopian fable such as Animal Farm, lead us to imagine a set of meanings located on the other side of this hermeneutic wall. In political and cultural terms, these meanings lying on the other side of the wall comprise parts of the whole of an ideology—its commentary and interpretation. Because allegory is a mix of making and reading combined in one mode, its nature is to produce a ruminative self-reflexivity. A large-scale allegory such as The Divine Comedy tends always to ruminate on its own levels of meaning, its own hermeneutic imperative, in a fashion we do not encounter, for example, with realism as in the novel or in historical writing. Selfreflection is obsessively an aspect of the allegorical method itself; that is, allegory works by defining itself in its enigmatic use. The motto of the mode might well be the line from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 64, on time and the poet’s destiny: “Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate.” The rumination focuses on symbolic activity occurring on both sides of an interpretive barrier. If my rather too solid wall metaphor holds, there is in allegory something odd about the wall; each side seems cognizant of the other’s activity, but each needs to accept that a semiotic barrier of some kind intervenes between

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story and significance. For centuries it was common to think of allegory as the semiotic medium for enigmatic thoughts. Two attributes of a basic ritual process—the traditional use of the interpretive guide—will illuminate this process, whereby interpretation is darkly enclosed within the boundaries of the fiction itself. Following this tradition of the interpretive guide, in The Divine Comedy Virgil and Beatrice accompany the narrator Dante; in The Pilgrim’s Progress a variety of friends counsel Christian on the meaning of his journey. Thus, in The Divine Comedy, the poet is shown the enigmatic meaning of his travel though the other world, meeting strange or strangely familiar persons from history or vision. These encounters constitute Dante the narrator’s experience of “the state of souls after death,” and they create in the reader a powerful curiosity and desire to interpret each step of the mysterious journey. So also in John Bunyan’s great Protestant work, Christian (and later his wife, Christiana, and their children) travels on a progress from temporal defeat to resurrection, and all along the way the story suggests ideas of trial, choice, hope, and fear attending that journey. Particular moments and events stem from a larger vision, in this case the virtually cosmic idea of a Christian life. Story and idea, both sides rather complex, are twinned along the journey. This ingemination, as a Renaissance poet would call it, amounts to a belief that creation and interpretation are doubles of each other; they need each other. If a poet writes an allegory, the resulting poem apparently invokes and then controls its own interpretation. In a modern science fiction novel, Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, the interpretive guiding principle is inherent to the discovery of Leibowitz’s banal shopping-list relic, a discovery made not casually but by a member of a desert religious order. The principle of organization by which a story implies a set of parallel meanings will obviously not work with stories told merely for the sake of the plot; why should any tale as such correspond to anything except perhaps life itself? The story has to be structured to project repeatedly implied sets of oblique meanings. It then follows that ritual plays a central role in all allegorical compositions or readings.1 In my own general theory of allegory, I have shown how such ritual spreads its effects widely, from an obsessive-compulsive psychic origin to the massed cultural inventions of sacred liturgical rituals or rituals of political rhetoric. Ritual seems to be one way to prevent excessive questioning of the wall metaphor to which I have referred, as if repeated actions could ease a hidden stress between the image and meaning. A skeptical view asks naturally for the grounding of

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such beliefs and practices, while to a great extent the unquestioning answer can usefully be that allegories flourish in the form of ritual interpretations. Given this ritual protection from skepticism, there seems to be no limit, either in religious history or elsewhere, to the number of adumbrations that may load discourse with extra meanings. Even when the plain sense of literal meaning conflicts with evolved doctrine of any kind, allegorical rituals employ methods of accommodating a privileged text to the system of ideas; another word for this accommodating art is commentary, and yet another, the broad term interpretation.

2 The interpretive dance of allegory is an ancient literary phenomenon, no doubt as old as the desire to convert speech and writing into “scripture,” where sacred writ is accorded an authoritative status. In the sixth century b.c., it was possible to read Homeric epic as an allegory of physical forces, so that the apparent irrationality of the chthonic and Olympian gods was made into an acceptable allegorical parallel to nature’s wildness. Much ­later, with the establishment of the Christian church, a quite different mode of accommodation developed into an elaborate semiotic system, whereby all events could be read as implying the omnipotent providence of God. The system of interpretation keeps on changing its court of appeal, usually slowly, but at times fast. Medieval practice seems to be the most revealing stage to examine before attempting any reach into the strange kind of allegory I am proposing. Let us recall the most familiar tag from medieval Christian exegesis, the fourfold method, which is known to poets and theologians alike. Reams have been written—Henri de Lubac wrote four densely packed volumes—on this simple statement of policy, its origins in Judaism and early Christianity, and on the various ways allegory could be found in and around biblical texts, sermons, secular literature, and life in general. The interpretive method was encapsulated in four mnemonic lines: Littera gesta docet; Quod credas allegoria; Quid agas moralia; Quo tendas anagogia.

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Loosely translating, we get: The letter teaches events, actions, and history; What you believe is the allegory; What you should do is the moral; Whither you leaning (your final purpose) is the anagogy.

Christian exegetes often reduced the fourfold to a dyadic set, with the first half being the literal sense of a text and items two, three, and four together constituting the “spiritual” interpretation of the letter. Augustine would have seen the method in that way, recognizing paradoxically that the literal is the most subtle part of the fourfold, for without a degree of grammar, utterance, and rhetoric, the letter could not function at all; because on the biblical view God created by speaking, no derived or original sacred text could be a pure grapheme, functioning as pure Derridean différance. Even so, while the chief mystery of language is packed into the first level—the literal—there is also, according to this patristic view, a standard efflux of extra meanings, those other three levels. Massive medieval texts, such as the Cosmographia of the twelfth-century author Bernard Silvestris, typically exfoliate their meanings in complex designs, all of them streaming from the fourfold sense of the text. The method descends especially from close readings of the works of Saint Augustine, for example, his treatise On the Trinity. The hermeneutic adventure has been fully documented and analyzed by modern scholars such as M. D. Chenu, Jean Daniélou, de Lubac, Jean Pépin, A. C. Charity, and, more recently, Jon Whitman, who, in his book on allegory, has reduced the wealth of issues to a manageable and analytically helpful conspectus.2 The medieval fourfold system of reading is obviously the source of a rich semiotic because it can range from the most physical of senses to the most mysterious; if what is morally of concern (in the third level) is not understood as to its form of belief (second level), there will be a gap in the overall sense being conveyed, a kind of fragmentary loss of coherence. In fact, the four levels continuously modify each other as to meaning. What is remarkable is that no exegetical scholar has given any weight to what appears to be the philosophical source of the fourfold system, that is, the theory of the four causes given in the Metaphysics and Physics of Aristotle. In Aristotle, all events and all change (as with natural motion, or kinesis) occur in relation to the four aspects, or “fashions,” of causation, as the philosopher Jonathan Lear would say.3 First, the material cause virtually

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states its own character because objects and events are composed in some sense materially, of matter, in one respect or another. Materiality is hence an initial type of causal efficacy. Second, things and events have a formal cause, in that the design of their changing gives a second essential attribute of their potential for change. Third, things and events have an efficient cause because they need energy and thrust to bring about their motion from a potential to actual state. Fourth, they possess a final cause, for any movement or change of state—materialized, formalized, and energized— still requires a goal or purpose, an end toward which their changing aspires. This famous tetrad directly parallels the medieval fourfold method of interpretation, and one can only suppose its neglect in the commentaries to result from a refusal of the secular aspect of the Physics. The reason I stress this neglect is that it marks a failure to note the preChristian physical basis of the history of allegory. By neglecting to see that the allegorist’s four levels of meanings are actually four levels of natural causation—admitting that here we deal with Aristotelian, pre-Galilean science— we fail to establish our next step in the historical account of the fortunes of allegory in the West. Lurking under the veil of hermeneutic obscurity, as the Bible and other texts were read, there had always been an Aristotelian implication, if it is correct that the four causes underlie the four levels of Christian exegesis. That supposition may be historically impossible to prove; its point—the strong analogy between the two systems of fourfold explanation—remains viable. We commonly say that Aristotle explains change in terms of four “causes”; but, as Richard Hope shows, in his translation of the Metaphysics, the words aitia and aition have many shades of meaning, perhaps best summed in the phrase “basic explanation.”4 This in turn leads to a sense of cause as “idea.” The idea of a thing is in effect its cause, and, as idea, points us to the basic explanation of the thing being the way it is, not accidentally or contingently, but in essence. This sequence of relations in turn leads to the link between Aristotle (a fundamental Christian authority, of course) and the medieval allegory of the four levels of meaning. For each of these levels is an aition or system of aitia; and, in that respect, each level of interpretation is a “basic explanation,” or, as Hope translates the key term, cause is the basic “explanatory factor” in reading the phenomenon of change correctly. A “level of meaning,” finally, is a particular set of “explanatory factors,” as, for instance, materials of which an object is made, or purposes to which its design contributes, and these factors in turn are accorded the status of ideas. In every case, the hermeneutic system is naturalized by virtue of

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its link to Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics and anterior to those founding texts, the platonic theory of ideas. Given the embedded nature of the Aristotelian tradition, it is no wonder that on occasion exegetes might say there are more than four interpretive levels, as many as seven. Rich with interpretive debate, this tradition opens up many doors, but behind them all there is a vision of the essential properties of being. Each of the four causes, or four levels, points to an essential (and only in that sense “natural”) aspect of the Aristotelian reasons why things happen as they do. A deep essentialism animates this whole approach to meaning. If we say that the standard medieval interpretive system yields an allegory of ideas, we are also saying that it is an allegory of essences. Plato had imagined that the idea belongs to a realm of the unchanging, hence in a sense “eternal,” and it has the aitiological power to generate change in things that need to change. The ideas toward which change points—say the events in a story— are points of unchanging essence, presided over by an ultimate unchanging essence, the final cause or anagogia of Christian destiny. It is this resort to the finality of final causes that gives to Christian interpretation, say the account of doctrinal debates over science, even when extremely learned, such as Frederick Copleston’s History of Philosophy, that strange willingness to assimilate all contradictions to the mysterious oneness and omnipotence of God, as if an essential property of the divine could resolve an earthly contradiction one has just noticed. One may feel better, but one has not resolved the contradiction.5 Of course, such maneuvers tend to reinforce an impression of divine authority because mystery always suggests the touch of arbitrary power—like the King’s Touch, on which magic belief the great medievalist Marc Bloch wrote a whole book. In medieval philosophy, it was no doubt inevitable that a thinker such as William of Ockham would sooner or later arise to question the allegory of ideas, and this questioning in fact leads to the steady building of a quite different tradition of allegory, which I wish now to examine, in brief and roughly.

3 Against the current of embedded Christian tradition, with its two-, four-, and sometimes sevenfold expansions, I want now to propose the peculiar, not to say uncanny, idea of an allegory without ideas. Most readers of fiction will say that allegory has too many ideas, especially if cataloged and ordered

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according to the medieval taxonomy. But even a modern allegory such as George Orwell’s 1984 or Camilo Jose Cela’s The Hive is likely to be seen this way; there is this idea, and that one, and that one, and so on. The average reader, schooled if at all on the traditional model or on a watered-down version of it, will be baffled by the thought of an allegory without ideas. How can that be? An allegory without ideas would at best seem to be a paradox, not unlike the Liar’s Paradox—impossible, but logically and formally necessary. If interpretation yields ideas that are somehow “in” the text, then an allegory lacking them would not be interpretable, not even readable. Or so it appears at first. It seems hard to imagine a fiction that failed to yield a surplus of extra, other (allos) meanings. Fortunately perhaps, we know that “the liar” is a logically possible paradox of self-reference, however baffling, and so is an allegory without ideas. First, let us say that only with allegory, where the system of ideas is so important, could you even get their specific exclusion. With most literature, we are aware of overtones in the many different ways of understanding the stories told—a realistic novel such as Anna Karenina can elicit interpretation of its own social commentary, even though not an allegorical commentary. The fact that high symbolism of the post-Romantic era can inspire deep commentary does not suggest that it can become “symbolism without ideas,” for the reason that in some basic sense it never had ideas, it had only a profound, implicit apprehension of “something far more deeply interfused,” as Wordsworth wrote in “Tintern Abbey.” If high realism (the nineteenth-century novel would give our examples) can express the things of this world, high symbolism—say Baudelaire, with all his religious yearnings—can express the feelings of our being. Both modes are secular in their inspiration, and neither is especially authoritarian and rigid in form. From them there is almost no way to subtract out the ideas, almost no way to produce the empty field on the other side of the wall. But with allegory, in theory, this is not the case. It is just that an allegory without ideas would be weird.

4 The platonic theory of ideas modulated into that system we know as the “realism” of the medieval philosophers and theologians—“realism,” of course, because the ideas were the only ultimately unchanging reality, as permanent as the music of the spheres. On this foundation the allegory we usually take

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to be defining for the mode was built, and even in the case of modern works such as 1984 and Animal Farm and most of Karel and Josef Capek’s plays and stories, this ancient idea-bound method is what the authors use. It is extremely powerful and will remain so, even though there will be continuing changes in the situation of allegorical thinking. Allegorical works such as R.U.R. and The War with the Newts reflect ideas of power as conditioned by twentieth-century combinations of war and industry; and, to the extent that such conditions are superseded, the allegory of power will correspondingly have to change. Yet any traditional allegory of power struggles will always look to a system of ideas where power is related to a platonic idea of power. Nominalism, we recall, differs from realism chiefly in the following way. It questions the possibility of universals, those abstract entities that we identify with various modes of platonic form (the idea, the eidos of ancient Greek). No matter how different any particular thing or species may be, it can, under the umbrella of a universal idea (such as “tree”), be represented for us in all its essential character. Any given tree that I am pruning will be one that I see and touch, and hence the truly universal idea of the tree will rise above any sense perceptions involved in my pruning work or the tree’s resulting appearance. Contingency, individuality, concreteness of the given thing will disappear into the perfection of the universal idea. This famous platonic notion is by no means dead; Bertrand Russell, Gottlob Frege, and Kurt Gödel were all, as mathematicians, inclined to accept the platonic view of the absolute perfection and extrahuman aspect of ideas and, in this respect, were opposed to the constructivist mathematical thinking of Luitzen Brouwer. For present purposes, to bring the ideal character of ideas down to Earth, the examples of number and geometric forms serve well enough—they simply do not change: “Three” is not “fairly close to three” on Tuesday or “threeish” over the weekend. Geometric figures do not change in the manner of the real objects they are used to demonstrate in physics. It seems impossible to imagine their changing or melting like a lump of butter. Triangles thus indeed seem to share in a kind of eternal stability, even permanence, residing in a platonic heaven of unchanging forms. To raise questions about such absolutist thinking, Jane Austen composed the famed ironical opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” The trouble with natural mutability is what Ockham noticed in a variety of ways, and he came to argue for the constructing power of the analytic

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mind. He saw that if experience showed us only the grounds for an allegorical “system of ideas,” perhaps all would be well, but some universals are like the color blue, in which all sorts of different, individual, singular blue things and appearances seem to share. The moment one thinks seriously about what might be called degrees of universality, one begins to fret over the defining edges of the concepts that appear truly or really universal or, as a platonist might say, really real. How and wherein is it a universal observation if I measure a gallon of water? What is the relation between a particular instance of something, say a slice of Brie, and its genus, le fro­ mage, in general? Long before Austen delighted her property-minded readers, Ockham (ca. 1300–1350) introduced the radical principle that universals were in fact not eternal realities but were constructions of human thought, concepts in the mind. He argued for the constructing power of the analytic mind. Because no medieval Christian member of the church could very well escape the field of allegorical vision, we may say that Ockham was subverting the chief technical support of Christian theology, namely, our ability to substitute unquestioned human conceptions in place of the divine archetypes as imagined by religion. On this view, as Roger Scruton says, universals were “brought into being by thought—specifically, that there is no more to the reality of universals than our use of general terms.” Hence we get the term nominalism, “because the theory gives precedence to the name of the property over the property itself.”6 No longer is there an abstract platonic realm where universals live eternally free of all change. W. V. Quine summarizes the nominal dream this way: “Even the sophisticated Aristotelian principle that such permanent forms can live through their living instances, as immanent presence of the idea—even this principle now falls under the nominalist axe. When we say this tree is green, for a fact, then ‘it is a fact about us.’” Quine goes on: Nominalism is in essence, perhaps, a protest against a transcendent universe. The nominalist would like to suppress “universals”—the classes of our universe—and keep only the concrete individuals (whatever these may be). The effective consummation of nominalism in this sense would consist in starting with an immanent (non-transcendent) universe and then extending quantification to classes by some indirect sort of contextual definition. The transcendent side of our universe then reduces to fictions, under the control of the definitions.7

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We humans, then, in our defining powers, would become the masters of an immanent world, without recourse to any supreme fiction. In a philosophic universe where definitions are “contextual,” they must in some general sense be relativistic procedures, and it was then asked by critics of nominalism, including Quine, whether the idea of “relation” and “relativity” is an eternal idea or not. Nominalism seems to envisage a world of endless qualification in speech and thought, so that no “classes” of things are even believed to be anything ultimately serious, until instanced by a concrete particular. One is reminded of the language machine in Gulliver’s Travels, where in essence there had to be as many word-blocks, made of wood, as there were thoughts about anything. There is no reason to suggest that the logic of such matters is simple, nor that ideas disappear entirely owing to the nominalist attack or scrutiny, but we do come to imagine a radical shift resulting from Ockham’s approach to the real. If pushed to an extreme, one can imagine that sophisticated later poets such as Andrew Marvell were trying to evoke a world where the ideal green color may be imagined as such but where the more perfect rendering of greenness is only “the dawning of an aspect,” as Ludwig Wittgenstein would later put it.8 Green is an “accident,” as the philosophers would say, but there is no platonic evergreen. Green as a living experience, the only green we know, if we think of it, belongs to the poets, whom Plato outlawed from the Republic. Marvell’s poem “The Garden” seeks to express a broadly questioning view of these deep matters and leaves the reader with a sense that if there is to be an allegory of colors, it will have to doubt any ideal, perfect, eternal basis. To describe what Marvell is doing, we should use the idea of allotropes from chemistry rather than allegory as understood from the rhetoricians: Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less, Withdraws into its happiness: The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find, Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds, and other seas, Annihilating all that’s made To a green thought in a green shade.9

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What happens when we extend this annihilation to the field of allegory is that we must then rethink our wall between the literal and the higherorder interpreted “meanings,” the significatio of medieval exegesis. If nominalist, then there will be no ideas in a strict sense, no meanings segregated to a “higher” place on the interpretive side of the wall. The so-called ideas of virtue and vice, good and evil, happiness and misery, fame and fortune will no longer be read as referring to universal notions. They will be mere functions of shared human speech and language, mere conventions, mere names and their grammar. The allegory without ideas could make no appeal to universals and hence could never legitimately establish belief in imagined higher values. Such surgically disformed allegory could never appeal to any hierarchic system defined in terms of the perfect. Furthermore, this allegory without ideas in the strict platonic sense, we might call it the Fregean mathematical sense, could not claim any serious degree of permanence in its meanings and interpretations, for as language changes with use, so does meaning, on the nominalist view. You might think that allegory has never pretended to full permanence of meanings—after all, the quo tendas of the medieval distych, the “whither we are tending,” implies an openness to change. Surely the poets and preachers have always been aware that values and ideas change, and hence presentations of their formal structures, their moral pleas, their anagogical visions, were always undergoing evolution over the millennia. But that is exactly the point. There is a deep internal conflict, or evasion, at the heart of an ambivalent allegorical procedure that seems to contradict itself, by its very operations. Yet allegory is the authoritarian mode of literature and art and discourse, and its claim to be able to project permanent truths is perhaps its chief traditional claim. Its employment of ritual forms reinforces this claim. The central issue seems always to return to the “system of ideas” to which parabolic fictions allude. Granting that traditional allegories, whatever their languages and hermeneutic resources, simply believe in ideas and in something like philosophical realism, the poets and their interpreters do not often probe the logical consequences of believing in platonic ideas. True poets do not follow Rudolf Carnap into battle, trumpeting positive facts. Poetry is too lively, like a person of amiably loose morals. Like the rest of us, poets simply use ideas, the way Mozart uses fugal passages, a point much appreciated by those who have tried to build workable models of nominalism, only to find that by reducing all expression to a system of

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named concepts, you produce an infinite regress into a nightmare world of endless particulars—the opposite of the realist’s productions of endless relations, relations of relations, and so on forever. In the ordinary world we live in, thankfully we have ideas; we use them to make general statements every minute of the day. We gain the platonic shortcut, if not to the truth at least to an effective and approximately ordered universe of discourse, where we use general ideas without worrying how they relate to their examples, their components. Following this custom, as rather old-fashioned moderns such as Orwell followed it, allegory adopts the pattern fixed by the wall between letter and meaning (allegorical signification, gloss, hyponoia, and the like). Because that is the old custom, we still tolerate its assumptions. But nominalism planted the seed of doubt; and, in certain periods of early modern literature and now more recently, the post-Romantic world gives way to what I am calling an allegory without ideas, partly for convenience but partly because there has at times arisen a belief that ideas in the strict sense are dangerous fictions, if imagined to have divine origin. The task of the critic will be to suggest how this shift, occurring on and off since the Middle Ages, has escaped from falling into nominalist hell. We are certainly not confident about ever reaching realist heaven.

5 Increasingly, with fits and starts, allegory after the late medieval period must be read as turning the ideas toward a vision of the secular. Ideas become the paradoxical tropes of historical events and conditions, and in this sense literature shares in Quine’s version of the nominalist’s “contextual” reading of ideas. Ideas for a cosmography have not broken free of their eternal implication; they are by no means entirely independent of their platonic source. Still, however, the change is occurring under the surface. A brief note on literary history will support this view. In France, Agrippa D’Aubigné writes Les Tragiques. Tasso rewrites his Jerusalem Delivered to become Jerusalem Conquered, so that while strengthening the ideality of his epic, he simultaneously reflects the acute pressures of the Counter-Reformation. In En­ gland, the tradition of the morality play weakens, despite leaving its imprint, for example, on the metamorphosis of the medieval Vice character, who becomes Marlowe’s Mephistophilis or Shakespeare’s Iago. Following the mid-sixteenth-century success of The Mirror for Magistrates, a strong

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new current of interest in local history seems to inspire the poet Samuel Daniel to write his Civil Wars and another major poet, Michael Drayton, to write The Barons’ Wars. These revivals of chronicle, one of which—Ralph Holinshed’s—profoundly altered Shakespeare’s career, do not completely materialize the earlier interest in the platonic idea, but they do insist on its historical immersion. One could hardly imagine an English author more addicted to the medieval allegory of ideas than Edmund Spenser, and yet he conveys a strong sense of current political events and a general historicity colliding with archaic myth (the carrier wave of universals), as if to ensure that the epic poem be seen to construct its ideas (its guiding thematic classes of thought). In that way, Spenser, for all his medieval yearnings and leanings, is a modern, forcing his vast allegory to think more and more about current historical pressures, as his epic proceeds into its final three books. The great English drama of the public theater of course reflects material realities in all directions; one great Shakespearean scholar said that altogether the plays “wrote the history of his times.”10 A more critical example, however, is the intimate link of idea and current fact that animates virtually all the court masques of the period. Scholars, myself included, have shown that the masque expresses universal ideas of harmony and discord, but only in the context of courtly dynamics; and hence the idea is almost undermined by what was called the “antimasque.” The latter was a rhetorical Jacobean device of dramatic irony, to be sure, but such burlesque irony is exactly what undermines the eternal perfection the allegorical idea had been imagined, since Plato, to possess. For most recent readers, however, the movement toward an allegory without ideas comes with the middle of the seventeenth century. This was deeply understood by Walter Benjamin and was thus described, in many dimensions, by his book on the Ursprung, the explosive origins, of the German Trauerspiele. Among the many points Benjamin makes, none is more important than the way these “mourning plays” employ an imagery of ruins, for that in turn implies that allegory, as Benjamin saw, defies the older notion of the allegory of ideas. Those platonic universals could not change, but here ruin means the changing of everything believed to be most permanent. This point parallels A. O. Lovejoy’s almost prophetic chapter on the temporalizing of the Great Chain of Being, where Lovejoy showed how the static, idea-supporting dream of the Platonistic tradition began to fall apart, sliding away from its atemporal perfection, as a new and largely scientific knowledge brought with it an awareness that

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the world is getting older, thus influencing old and hallowed models of fixity.11 Reflecting the cultural shocks wrought by raison d’état, the Trauer­ spiel engages with history in a radical sense, through a focus on allegories of power, but throughout the baroque exploitation of this dramatic form there is everywhere a reduction of meaning to signs. Everything becomes emblematic, and each event is made into a fragment, to increase the feeling that the cohering beautiful ideas of the past are now being literally dismembered. Yet in spite of the fragmentary image, the overall effect of these plays remains “the very fluidity of time.”12 Benjamin pushes hard to show that allegory and symbol differ from each other profoundly, as temporal sequence in real time differs from the mystical, unifying, visionary “spot of time” so dear to the Romantics (thus giving rise to Paul de Man’s famous essay, “The Rhetoric of Temporality”). A critical work so rich in observation deserves more than summary, however, so I shall point to only one thing about Benjamin’s great essay. In line with the period it considers, the war-torn seventeenth century, the apparently drifting but in fact controlled discussion of the Trauerspiel consistently suggests that the material context of action in these German allegories is intentionally made thinglike. Whereas an earlier vision might have shown the ideal version of courtly order, as Spenser does, this one shows the court as a material thing and framework for the significant themes of the work. Things and material conditions here become surrogates for what before would have been patently recognizable ideas. This is not political science but rather what one might call the coinage of a new materialized reality, as if the hard facts were all there is. These plays look forward to Heinrich von Kleist’s dissections of false beliefs and empty ideals, but in themselves the plays enforce a belief that the realm of the ideal is not only empty but false to any truth we may hope to attain. Thus we get the famous remark, “Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things” (GTD, 177–178, 182). To take one example, which in my own research I found to have the same function that Benjamin finds, the picturesque is a newly invigorated mode, for it depends heavily on what Karl Borinski called “a picturesque field of ruins” (GTD, 178). It then follows from such usages that this new and odd allegory without ideas will depend heavily on inscriptions, dedications, and the like, all of which attempt to reduce the lively image to the static printed sign. The overall effect of these tragedies, as Benjamin saw them, was to fix the allegorical mode of attaining “other meanings” by reducing all truth to a radical materialism. Summing the

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subtle variety and scope of this critique, one must say that Benjamin, the great collector, saw that an allegory without ideas would have to be the expression of a collector’s mania, which indeed the Trauerspiele are.

6 If this seventeenth-century Trauerspiel episode marks one stage along the way of a dispersed nominalism, another is the not unrelated development of a sfumato style in the Romantic approach to a literary absolute. Benjamin cites Novalis with approval, for Novalis perceived “a certain strangeness, respect, and bewilderment which shimmer through the writing” of the Baroque allegorists, and he furthermore perceived that now allegory will become indirect (with no clear division between the two sides of the hermeneutic wall), in fact is bound to approach the condition of music (GTD, 187). On the other hand, as Novalis also noted, “Scenes which are genuinely visual are the only ones which belong in the theatre. Allegorical characters, those are what people mostly see. Children are hopes, young girls are wishes and requests” (GTD, 191). Because natural scenes are coming more and more to have sublime and picturesque value, the Romantics make an effort to cloud the “scenes which are genuinely visual”—the staple of all older allegory. Romanticism at large makes an effort to fray the edges of clear ideas in allegory, as we see when Karl Solger debates with his friend Ludwig Tieck over the nature of allegory and its relation to symbol, claiming an important literary place for the mystical/obscure, even for the unconscious, as we might expect in a correspondence of 1818, when the sublime had long been a European passion.13 Allegory, for Solger, should aspire to mysticism, but there is no doubt that as soon as irony comes to dominate the German critique of art and literature, the clear-eyed belief in fully established and presumably fixed “systems of ideas” ceases to work toward an allegorical modality of the medieval kind. Solger would say the depiction of God and his heaven in Paradise Lost is insipid rationalism, mere scheme, whereas he finds the formal Miltonic allegory of Sin and Death splendid—clearly because it seems to him mysterious and obscure. However we agree or disagree with these early judgments of Milton and his methods, of allegory and symbol in the light of Romanticism, we shall discover that the problem of allegory has become the question of the obscure. A Solger or Tieck, whose thought unquestionably derives from earlier medi-

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tations on the sublime and its link to allegory, can be shown to puzzle about mysticism, not just in the light of German pietism but because allegory had once possessed a numinous connection to the analogical, not to mention the medieval anagogical level, which it seemed, after the Enlightenment, to have lost. Allegory was partly responsible for this loss, for it had relied too long on belief in unexamined universals, but the fact remains that allegory was yet another inevitable victim of a larger change in beliefs, yet one more victim of early modern science, which I take to be the philosophic heir to Ockham’s nominalism. The question of gain and loss revolves around the fundamental notion that allegory deals in expressions of otherness because otherness itself infuses the parable and the fable with a contagion of whatever beliefs are dominant in the period at hand. In simpler terms, with allegory, the interpretation and the meanings on the hermeneutic side of our wall determine whatever we find or invent on the fable side of the wall. Here, interpretation determines creation. The Creation itself is interpreted, as the rabbis often claimed, before the world comes into being. This sounds oddly like a quantum mechanical experiment, but however we imagine it, we seem to be dealing with an enigmatic interaction between the real and the nominal.

7 Finally, turning to the most recent period, we are reminded that, in his discussion of allegory in “The Ideology of Modernism,” Georg Lukács raises the question as to whether the nominalist drift arose by nature out of an inner tendency of transcendence or came about as “the product precisely of a rejection of these tendencies.”14 Taking the largest possible view, Lukács says that Benjamin had been asking how transcendent idealism (medieval realism, in effect) could not fail to destroy art itself. This ancient question keeps on recurring, to be sure. True also it is that for Benjamin, “the Baroque idea of history as the passion of the world . . . makes History significant only in the stations of its corruptions. Significance is a function of mortality—because it is death that marks the passage from corruptibility to meaningfulness.” The Benjaminian theme of the ruin is read by Lukács as a “link between allegory and the annihilation of history.”15 In this context, Franz Kafka becomes a key figure, for his allegories deny any possibility of

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historical change in the conditions of human life as progress toward freedom, as a Marxist would wish to anticipate. No doubt the central figure for analysis should be Kafka, therefore, in the sense that his vision of almost mystical impotence of the hero leaves us wondering if this is not a sort of new-minted platonic idea. Of course, in logic and ontology, it cannot be such, and yet there is an apocalyptic ideality in Kafka that disturbs Lukács, as compared, let us say, with Thomas Mann. How much a certain historical grit will rescue allegory from the medieval model, and hence push it toward a more modern nominalism, will in part depend on a precise understanding of the way allegory figures its meanings. Allegory, unlike other modes, holds its meanings walled off from the source or initial stage of its utterance. My wall metaphor stands for the method of blocking and encapsulating meaning into strata or levels or schematic structures. Some ancients said that allegory is a “continued metaphor”; Cicero called it a “continuous stream” of metaphors that flow (fluxerunt), while it became an unexamined custom to think that allegorical elements are carried forward on a thread of parabolic story.16 If, like Longfellow in his famous poem to the American Union, you continue a metaphor of the ship of state, you present whatever parts of the ship, including its launching, that may be ready to press into allegorical service. But this idea of “continued metaphor” has always seemed wrong to me, if only because, while metaphors bring aesthetic life into expression, allegory is obsessively and at times deliberately anesthetic. If, as massive evidence from commerce, politics and religion suggests, allegory typically begins by striking the eye, in the long run its “advertising” ends by anesthetizing the very sense it arouses initially. It must therefore keep upping the ante. In this modality, image and idea are locked in a ­deadly embrace. Nothing makes it easy to separate the couple, for image and idea (the latter defined in either ancient Platonic terms or modern Lockean psychological terms) are fundamental to all mental processes. Nevertheless, we may relate the intermixture to my present argument in the following way. As noted at the outset, allegory is always involved in symbolisms of power. Furthermore, this involvement takes the complex form of ritual sequence, such that its repetitions provide its rhythm, a pacing that in turn dulls the mind and senses, by virtue of the noise implicit in the redundancy. (Identical or strongly similar signals rapidly become hard to differentiate from each other—the dulling effect.) Eventually this generalized anesthesia

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stupefies the responder, so that a new problem arises—the sender of the message has to turn up the volume, in every way. An ancient branch of history shows this to be the case with religious propaganda; the faith only propagates when its authority is driven home with Pavlovian insistence. If ritual repetition is most notable in religious practices, it occurs no less often nor with lower intensity in the propagation of massive secular consumerism; the secularity makes no difference because it is the repetition that counts, with the same need to constantly renew the faces, facades, and volume of the iconography. A spurious surface of variety tends to give allegory its claim to artistic skill, but underneath there is always the tendency toward controlled, ritual iterations, by which it happens that the mode can only reinforce stereotypes, slavishly imagining a world according to Flaubert’s idiot savants, Bouvard and Pécuchet. We need, as it were, a new Flaubertian “dictionary of received ideas.” Advertising today (as we see in media-driven “politics”) wages semiotic war, forcing masses of people into secular addictions to buying and consuming. Iconography, in my strict sense, almost always triggers a need to consume the symbol. Not accidentally does advertising always verge on symbolic terrorism, instilling a fear that one’s implanted addiction will not be satisfied, except by rushing out to get the buyer’s fix. Nor does our sophisticated, ironic, or cynical ability to see through doubtful advertising claims make much difference, for the ritual repetitions have already done their work; they have implanted half-truths at a deeper level, as if we had already been mesmerized. Promotional duplicities are of course familiar phenomena, but I want to link them to the machinery of ritual repetition. There is little virtue in holding the anesthetic effect at a comfortable academic arm’s length. Forced gravitas is a big mistake. We need hardly be told that institutionalized religions have been practicing ad campaigns since the beginning of time. The postmodern change in allegory, away from projecting transcendent ideas always subject to interpretation, toward a positivistic projection of material facts, as if they could adequately double for ideas, is not without its intricate developments. Brilliant authors—just think, for example, of A. S. Byatt or J. G. Ballard—have shown this. What we need always to reconsider is the underlying allegorical impulse to control symbols of power. This I have called “daemonic agency,” and it has many faces. Although I am here claiming a postmodern turn in the history of allegory, the allegorical mode of action is always daemonic. Lest one need a reminder of

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this, consider a fountainhead, Paradise Lost, where Milton always uses the traditional term for the Daemons of his cosmic tale: In Book Five we learn that “Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers” are what the Fallen Angels possess. But, as Satan at once tells them, they have become what they possess. Similarly, in The Possessed Dostoyevski later wrote the psychological story of this cognitive collapse; his novel is a vast parable of the way daemonic agents become possessed by what they possess. In Milton the Daemons, including good ones, the eudaimonia, including the Song of God, are finally simply called “Powers,” while their personification depends directly on an enclosing cosmological belief system, a widespread illusion that daemonic energies (Milton’s “Virtues”) rightly constitute justified power and legitimate authority. The great literary allegories have always tried to attenuate this participation in the larger power game, by allowing their instructive fictions to be ambiguous in narrative line and verbal expression. Nevertheless, the belief that allegory permits metaphoric continuation without losing the lively force of metaphor constitutes an important error. Despite arguments advanced by Victor Turner, ritual repetition will finally block the metaphoric function of seeing differences in sameness, a blocking that in turn must deny the claims of nature, expression, and natural philosophy. Hence the allegorist treads a fine, frustrating line. She will try to round off the corners of ritual. Along with unduly controlled ambiguity of language, allegory at its most useful and its most human always seeks to flex its main device of personification, which in a new direction postmodern allegory seeks through its strange and estranged nominalism, by rejecting what is left of the platonic, transcendental system of the ideas. Channeled into the nominalistic worldview, this new allegory immediately takes the next nominalistic step beyond the concrete naming of concepts: It finds its ideas almost completely materialized into things such as robots, cyborgs, microdust, and the like. Things and objects, often unexamined, will serve like mercenary substitutes for the original transcendental syntax. Curiously, the move resembles certain thoughts of Bishop Berkeley, who wrote in one of his Dialogues that a certain understanding of objects is capable of “changing . . . ideas into things.” For that to happen, the fiction must reshape the animistic trope of personifications, now appearing in a markedly new mode. This nominalistic allegory must occlude the older tradition, mockingly, paradoxically, as if it could find its new lexicon in a postmodern version of the Flaubertian dictionary.

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When personifications cross in our minds from the literal to the figurative, they are the figurae of a passage between matter and spirit. That explains why Shakespeare created Wall, the most comically mysterious character in all his plays, when seeking to mystify the foolishly magical and weirdly concrete parabolic story of Pyramus and Thisbe. Much more could be said, and students of hermetic thought have indeed said much, about the question of passing between the esoteric and the exoteric, but what seems necessary is that there be some sort of magic agency to carry messages back and forth between letter and spirit. I mentioned Solger’s Romantic sense of atmosphere before; in that light, looking ahead to the postmodern period, I would claim that when postmodern allegorical agency is fully personified and fully atmospheric, it requires conspiracy. Allegory on this basis must be a kind of conspiratorial agreement to employ secret meanings for public or semipublic meanings and communications. This approach via atmosphere cannot fail to suggest the darker purposes of a Machiavellian theory of power, a central issue from which my remarks began. Not all allegories are fraudulent, but it is certain that all frauds are allegorical. When William of Ockham invented the nominalist method, he was inspired by his belief that the papacy was at that time engaging in fraud. He was a devout believer, so he came up with the idea that the platonic ideas are incredibly vulnerable to fraudulent uses. It seems that nominalist allegory must get rid of its ideas, in order that persons and actual behaviors be held accountable to those pondering the destiny of the Faith. Similar attitudes, if I read Ockham correctly, appear and reappear often in history, and they surface in some of our postmodern fiction, where many readers will have experienced a climate of universal duplicity allied with studiously cultivated public ignorance and anesthesia. The Ockhamite awareness of vulnerability to fraud is not, if we think of it, unfamiliar to the critical thinker of today. It is apparent that most modern advertising verges on deliberate fraud, while advertising is the demotic version of allegory, always “pushing the idea” of this product or that product, even when the product is a personified political agency, say an inherently mindless leader who needs grafting onto a higher model. Virtually all political spinning is of this order, and its allegorical aspect matters, because by analyzing its demonic agency, we get closer to what the politician is really up to. Artists respond variously to this situation of a neorealist allegory pandemically spreading everywhere through universal corporate advertising. Authors such as Paul Auster question the Grand Narratives and fake Big

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Ideas by limiting their stories to a kind of Kafkan parabolic minimalism where, to quote Kafka’s parable on parables, the idea is to show that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible. But then, where and what could be the “idea” of such works? Perhaps there is none, and we are wrong to ask for one. In our own period, we readily see that if one wants allegory without dubious ideas, one must go in for Chinese boxes, the famous mise en abîme, in order that the making of the story itself, the recursive pursuit of the pursuit, would be the moving ground of a different sort of otherness. Italo Calvino wrote this story in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, where recursive structures lead the reader everywhere, if not quite nowhere. Let us suppose, then, that in good faith, and not like the perpetrators of allegorical fraud, we found in the Kafkan tradition an idea of otherness that is not “higher” but always “beyond,” always receding before us. This looks like infinite regress because its plan is infinite progression, or processing, of parts of the story. Both the elegance of an Auster and the Parisian tonality of his fables accompany this sense that, finally, otherness of the horizon is an end in itself. In his New York Trilogy, or the more recent Oracle Night, Auster meets himself as not quite a person but rather as an intervening guide to his own interpretation—as a disembodied writing agency, author of his fiction, character in his fiction, voice on the phone who comes from a medium outside of fiction, name recalled from an Auster family history, entry in a lost notebook, and so on, all of these personae disappearing deeper and deeper into the recesses of origin. The disappearance, if we may call it that, is an excursion into the heart of naming itself. As with a quite different author, the Don DeLillo of The Names or White Noise or Underworld, where the ancient rhetorician’s underthought or hyponoia becomes a fictive space, the compositional method approaches a secular, hermetic version of kabala. To give but one more example: José Saramago’s All the Names intensifies the reification of the name, simultaneously mystifying it, by placing its hero in a rather Kafkan “Central Registry,” where human identity becomes a function of “basic archivistic rules.”17 With all such authors we get a practicing imaginative version of nominalism that relies on narrative as a continuous definition of terms. The fable is intended to show what goes into creating or inventing the terms of any “higher” ontology because those terms no longer invent themselves according to a divine plan. We return to the stage when Ockhamite medieval philosophy, looking at the real world, saw that in a critical sense, every idea is also a name.

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Clearly with the present age there is a need to dig into the depths of meaning, as if there were no readily available guarantors that the quest could ever be satisfied. If I. A. Richards were to rewrite his famous early book, today it would have to be called The Unmeaning of Unmeaning. My sense is that a real-world imperative always underlines the drive toward a nominalist attitude; and, perhaps besides the authors I have mentioned, it would be best to range this imperative with the Scholastically informed fictions and plays of Beckett, and more radically with the stories of J. G. Ballard. Ballard’s work is not science fiction. It is an art of visionary extremism, in the sense that for him an ice age, a drowned or crystal world, a dried-out African continent, a civil war in Beirut are all scenes where actual events are so anomalous that they become mere names. He sees that when events are carried to monstrous extremes, there is no common realistic way to describe them—the scale is wrong—nor is there any “system of ideas” (with which we began this discussion) adequately in touch with what happens to give a higher order of understanding. Instead, there is only the task of rebuilding a frame of thought by exploring all the powers of naming. Naming is to be primordial, in literary history looking back to Daniel Defoe, as in J. M. Coetzee’s Foe, or looking to a work such as William Golding’s allegorical story of the first humans, The Inheritors, or to fantastic writing descended from the hyperdetailed surface of the nouveau roman and many earlier incarnations, mining the variations on the nominal grid (in our literature I think of Samuel Delany, to mention another intriguing author). In this inherently nominalist world we now inhabit, actions must be shown to plunge so deep into bland semiosis that they lose natural connection to norms of action. They are soon so fully derealized and nominalized that Ballard might properly say, quoting his own titles, “This is the suburban running wild we have created. We are in the atrocity exhibition; this is crash; this is the terminal beach; these are the vermilion sands; this is the drowned world.” As Benjamin’s account of baroque allegory insists, the translation of thing to name through a semiotic process of last resort is the mark of the postplatonic allegory. The fictions exuding from our increasingly overnumbered world are bound to lose the two ends of the medieval allegorical scheme of meaning because while the platonic idea seems more and more doubtful, the mere things and common events of life are being dwarfed into nothingness. Doubt permeates both ends of the spectrum of realism and nominalism. Of course, we have an inchoate popular search for lost identity—people looking for their ancestors on the Internet—and

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for this reason it is clear we must honor those authors who have asked us to question the grounds of a questionable comfort discovered in the unexamined idea. Our allegory without ideas asks how the idea can be situated and placed in a sea of ambiguous and vague possibilities, for this strange allegorical style seeks to create the dreams descending from William of Ockham. Returning, then, to our initial concern, we find that the allegory without ideas systematically serves to represent power relations with what amounts to an increasingly secular, pragmatic, and materialist set of operations. This mode deliberately constructs its meanings. Despite any origins it may have in the magic of names, and hence in the religious worldview, the rhetoric of power seeks to parallel power itself and hence its production in a field of force; it gains strength by abjuring the eternal ideas, while its constructivist techniques give it greatly extended and enhanced naming powers. The mode begins to resemble a very hip ad campaign. For good or ill, the allegory without ideas makes possible an always more cunning manipulation of all the symbols of power itself, especially the most currently appealing symbols. By such means an ancient expressive technique makes contact with the shock of the new and is at once confused and stimulated by our age of omnipresent noise and chaos. Notes 1.  On ritual forms, see my Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964), 195–199, 147–180. On power connections, see 41–66, 337–343. 2.  Jon Whitman, Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). 3.  Jonathan Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 28–42. 4.  Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Richard Hope (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 355. On the four causes, see 9ff., and on the “explanatory factor,” see 88ff. 5.  Frederick Copleston, SJ, A History of Philosophy, vol. 3 (New York: Doubleday Image, 1993), 62–69, 122–153. 6.  Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey (New York: Penguin, 1994), 89. 7.  W. V. Quine, The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 202. Quine and Nelson Goodman found difficulties, foreseen by Bertrand Russell, in getting nominalism to work. Its operative relational entities turn out to be realist “ideas,” after all.

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8.  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1999), 194, 206, 210, 212. Here Wittgenstein differentiates the gradual onset of emerging shapes from what he calls “continuous seeing.” His example is the duck–rabbit illusion. 9.  Andrew Marvell, “The Garden,” stanza 6. See Andrew Marvell, ed. Frank Kermode and Keith Walker (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1990), 48. 10.  This was a remark of the late Andrew Chiappe in a casual aside, one afternoon in the late 1960s at Columbia University. 11.  A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study in the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), chap. 9, 242–287. 12.  Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 2003), 165. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as GTD. 13.  See the “Tieck–Solger Correspondence,” in German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism: The Romantic Ironists and Goethe, ed. Kathleen Wheeler (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 151–158. 14.  Georg Lukács, Realism in Our Time: Literature and the Class Struggle (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 40. 15.  Lukács, Realism in Our Time, 41. 16.  Cicero, De Oratore, ed. and trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), book 3, chap. 41, section 166. Compare Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory, book 9, chap. 2, section 46. The notion of continued metaphor is very hard to unfix. 17.  José Saramago, All the Names, trans. Margaret J. Costa (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1999), 141.

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Memories and Allegories of the Death Penalty Back to the Medieval Future? jody enders

In 1495, in what is now the northern French city of Metz, an eighteen-yearold servant girl was burned at the stake in a most unusual way for having brutally murdered her newborn baby. As a large crowd gathers to witness both the death penalty in action and the special contraption crafted to add originality to the proceedings, her execution offers even today an unprecedented glimpse into the interplay between allegory, personification, forensic rhetoric, and memory, a nexus by which juridical culture makes meaning through the ultimate theatrical performative. The loquacious Philippe de Vigneulles, who was a historian, local politician, and frequent thespian in the rich theatrical life of Metz, tells the tale in his Chronicles. After some time at the pillory, the girl is moved to the scaffold: And there, a device had been fashioned that was out of the ordinary and unlike any other (non pas à la coustume des aultre): because this said girl was raised straight up against a large stake. And, first off, she had one of her hands cut off, and then the fire was lit and she was burned at the stake: but not so the fire would be allowed to consume her completely. Because, as soon as she was dead, they put out the fire, and she remained fully

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­ pright, which was a hideous thing to behold. And they put a wooden child u in her arms, along with a painting of a child (Et lui mist on ung anffans de boix entre ces bras, avec ung aultres en pointure).1

Just as one of the canonical functions of poetry is to make new again a tired old cliché or metaphor, so too, in 1495, did pictorialization, memory, theatricality, and the staging of a veritable drama of death remake, reanimate, reallegorize, as it were, that quintessential yet oh-so-dead metaphor of the law: to make an example of someone—and to do so in ways that lend new meaning to the term legal representation. There might well have existed a Foucauldian spectacle of the scaffold long before the grisly early modern events that dot the critical landscape of Discipline and Punish.2 Michel de Certeau might well have theorized that the law “writes itself on bodies” and “engraves itself on parchments made from the skin of its subjects.”3 Much earlier, with a metatheatrical vocabulary to match, Callistratus advocated a site-specific catharsis that attended the death penalty. In the great medieval compilation of legal teachings known as the Digest of Justinian, we read: The practice approved by most authorities has been to hang notorious brigands on a gallows in the place which they used to haunt, so that by the spectacle others may be deterred from the same crimes, and so that it may, when the penalty has been carried out, bring comfort to the relatives and kin of those killed in that place where the brigands committed their murders . . .4

And the rhetorical artes memorandi might well have trained generations of medieval legal theorists in large-scale allegorical habits of thought that ominously anticipate Friedrich Nietzsche’s belief that “only what goes on hurting will stick” in the memory.5 But none of it explains adequately the troubling thing that happened in 1495. To my knowledge, the painting of the murdered child, which was allegedly placed in the dead mother’s arms, has not survived; but, as we shall see, its iconographic traces were no longer necessary. Drawing on several stunningly visual fifteenth-century death penalty scenes, I argue instead that, once a cruel infanticide had already “burned the minds and scorched the memories”6 of such a medieval community as Metz, it was paramount that the first (pictorial) image of murder be replaced by a second image of justice. As Plato had once urged in the Laws, it was the duty of the lawmaker

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to “persuade people that their notions of justice and injustice are illusory pictures.”7 Thus, what the lawmakers of Metz needed was another picture of the justice that they were endeavoring to disseminate through that supremely allegorical event that is the death penalty, an event that transforms criminals into signs of themselves in that proverbial theater of everyday life.8 In Metz, they needed two images: a painting from the visual arts, not of the dead baby but a dead baby; and a prop from the world of theater— the wooden doll. In a cruelty that even Antonin Artaud could never have surmised, the doll doubles here as a prop from the theater of the law, where demonstrations are called ostension by Roman rhetoricians (and exhibits by contemporary attorneys).9 Both doll and painting stand in as surrogates for all babies,10 such that the legal community of medieval Metz produced an unforgettable concrete allegory, a representation that was simultaneously static and in motion, and a reified mise-en-scène that initiates us into the conflicted and conflictual world of medieval jurisprudence. Speaking of allegory involves speaking in riddles: dynamic reifications, hypostatic motion, tangible abstractions that one can see and feel and touch. It also means an irremediable interplay between what is literal and what is allegorical, such that the two apparent opposites seem, rather, to be synonyms. In the theory and practice of the law, which is still rife even in the present day with allegorical thinking,11 it was of the essence to reliteralize what had already been allegorized and theatricalized: legal representation. How law becomes allegory and theater and why it matters are questions that reveal a portentous tension between the seen and unseen, the literal and symbolic, the material and imaginary, stasis and motion, representation and not-representation—a tension that sends us hurtling back to a kind of medieval future.12 In a contemporary American culture in which the secrecy or privacy surrounding the death penalty mitigates against the very allegorization that the Middle Ages staged so dramatically, those questions certainly take us straight to the heart of the eternal hegemonic efforts to theatricalize legal retribution as a means of manipulating the remembrance of things past, present, and future.13 In the Rhetorica ad Herennium of ca. 84 b.c., one of the most widely disseminated educational texts of the European Middle Ages, the Pseudo-Cicero defined allegory as “a manner of speech denoting one thing by the letter of the words, but another by their meaning” (Permutatio est oratio aliud verbis

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aliud sententia demonstrans).14 Without dwelling on the odd resemblance of that definition to what most of us would call irony, suffice it to recall that one cannot address medieval allegory without bringing both law and theatricality into the picture of how things signify.15 For one thing, in the learned milieus in which allegory plays out, forensic oratory served as the contextual frame not only for allegory but for the entire art of rhetoric. For another thing, denotation is not quite the same thing as demonstration; and vive la différence, which lies in the theatrics of visual culture. To paraphrase Stephen Greenblatt’s oft-cited hypothesis about true versus false religion, one might say that “the difference between true and false legal politics is the presence of theater,”16 a bodily medium that is present in ways that poems, novels, or paintings are not. It is no coincidence, for instance, that, as his first example of the comparative properties of the trope of allegory, the Pseudo-Cicero looks to theatricality: “For when dogs act the part of wolves (funguntur), to what guardian, pray, are we going to entrust our herds of cattle?” (RAH, 4.46). In large part, that is because allegory constituted an extensive meditation about imitation, action, role playing, and appearances (deceiving or otherwise) in both the painting and the theatrical enactment of exemplary legal pictures, be it those of 1495, 2010, or beyond. As an important epistemological site of such “painting,” the ars memorandi had long trained medieval jurists to understand crime and punishment by staging a mental scene, a personal psychodrama in which personifications (in the form of costumed characters) stood in for legal ideas, arguments, and dramatic plots of crime and punishment:17 We ought, then, to set up images (imagines) of a kind that can adhere longest in the memory. And we shall do so if we establish likenesses (similitudines) as striking as possible; if we set up images that are not many or vague, but doing something (agentes imagines); if we assign to them exceptional beauty or singular ugliness; if we dress some of them with crowns or purple cloaks, for example, so that the likeness may be more distinct to us . . . (RAH, 3.37)

Even more relevant to the case under discussion is the fact that the psychic mise-en-scène that is memory also tended to focus as much on pictorial figuration as it did on deforming and disfigurement. Even in the lovely passage above, the Pseudo-Cicero goes on immediately to advise that images are

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also more memorable “if we somehow disfigure them (deformabimus), as by introducing one stained with blood or soiled with mud or smeared with red paint, so that its form is more striking. . . .” At the same time, however, he completes that sentence like so: “or by assigning certain comic effects to our images (aut ridiculas res aliquas imaginibus adtribuamus), for that, too, will ensure our remembering them more readily” (RAH, 3.37). That last point is of no small consequence in the various deathly denouements under discussion; for, although the inflammatory nature of infanticide makes for a compelling test case, the death penalty is scarcely the only medieval site for the disfiguring allegorization of punishment. Much as the Pseudo-Cicero described above the comic effects of mnemonic imagery, another spectacular— and infinitely less severe—punishment from Metz responded to what Philippe de Vigneulles dubs the “big joke” of 1511. When an unscrupulous German salesgirl came to market to sell pots of butter that turned out to be pots filled with “old breeches full of shit” (dez vielle braye toutte brenoize), she too was humiliated at the pillory for four hours. Surrounding her there were “seven of the pots hanging all around her”; they were literally—or is it allegorically?—rubbing her nose in it (CPV, 4: 99). Rhetorical memory arts provided a translation program of sorts from thought to image by putting the law into theatrical action (whence my earlier characterization of such phenomena as protodramatic).18 In an eerie twist on Richard Schechner’s notion of twice-behaved behavior,19 it seems that, if a medieval legal community sought to commit to the public memory a punitive act of justice, it was necessary to reallegorize it, to hypostatize the theatricality of an execution, to freeze the frame on the memory theater that had facilitated the allegorization in the first place by proposing motionless images, imagines non agentes, images that were no longer moving. A doll and a painting aid and abet the process; but so too does a charred corpse that is no longer a tableau vivant but a tableau mourant and, eventually, a tableau mort that could speak volumes, in silence, to all sorts of audiences—and not just to those who were able to conceive such things rhetorically because of their training at university. It so happens, moreover, that another version of the execution of 1495, also by Philippe de Vigneulles, yields a fascinating depiction of just such imagines-no-longer-agentes. In his Memoirs or Gedenkbuch, Philippe states anew that the infanticidal mother was burned “not as others are burned”; but he makes a number of distinctions. The “little wooden baby” (ung petit

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enffant de bois) was placed not in her arms but next to her; and, above all, he adds that the body itself was placed upon a wheel for a panoramic view of a slightly different version of the image: As soon as she was dead, they put out the fire and her body was placed upon a wheel; and they put next to her a little wooden child; and, along with that, there was another large paper, attached to the aforesaid wheel, upon which there was a painted child with his mother who was killing him (ung enffant en pointure et sa mère qui le tuoit).20

In that sense, the execution of 1495 served as a phased, episodic progression of deadening the mnemonic imagines agentes during the imposition of the death penalty. We follow the unnamed girl’s ordeal from a time when she is still alive during her four hours of humiliation at the pillory; when she is dying, as when her hands are cut off; and when she is dead, a charred corpse holding what seems, by comparison, to be a living doll or, at least, a doll who had once been alive enough for its mother to murder. This was a distorted mirror-image par excellence of the classic mnemonic technique of deploying visions, as Quintilian had once said, “whereby things absent are presented to our imagination with such extreme vividness that they seem actually to be before our very eyes” and whereby spectators come “face to face with the cruel facts (in rem praesentem),” such that a victim seems “not to have been murdered, but to be being murdered before their very eyes.”21 The Metz execution represents crimes absent through a variety of iconographic views of a moment of murder that was—with apologies for the mixed metaphor—frozen in time, but it does so with legally executed dead people who are present. If the ars memorandi was designed to “call the dead to life” (defunctos excitare), if rhetorical invention involved a prior imagistic conception of killing them first, and if medieval people were accustomed to living with the dead,22 then the judicial community of Metz has brought the victim back to life simultaneously with bringing the living, dying, and dead criminal all the way back to death—and presumably all the way home to heaven (and not to the eternal damnation of hell), given the girl’s “beautiful repentance at the end” (Gedenkbuch, 124). Furthermore, despite Philippe’s assertions to the contrary, the execution of 1495 was not the first Messin foray into such a process; nor would it be the last. Consider, for instance, that, in 1474, a murderer and adulterer had had both his hands cut off (one hand helping with the symbolic demonstration of the murder he had committed, the other “helping hand” providing

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a penalty for his theft of both the property and the wife of his employer). In the Chronicles, Philippe’s lengthy narrative moves, with the occasional echo of Boccaccio, from a rape-by-impersonation, to a murderous conspiracy between a wife and her lover, to the actual murder of her husband, to the criminals’ staging a false scene of the crime, to their dissemblance during separate police interrogations, and finally to the two spectacles of the scaffold of their two public executions. After the killers had been paraded through the city on the cart of infamy, the double execution took place on the Bridge of the Dead, where the former secretary of the rich merchant Dedier Baillat was the first to go: He “had his two hands cut off first, and then his head; and the explosive device (pétal) that he had used to inflict the fatal blow was attached so that it would hang high up next to the blade [presumably, with which the convicted killer had been decapitated] and next to the aforesaid head.”23 Similarly, approximately a decade after the events of 1495, when the time came to execute another young mother for infanticide, the community of Metz bore witness once again to the transmutation of another lengthy theatricalization into a more stable pictorial image. Philippe de Vigneulles assures us that the contraption devised for the ordeal of 1516 was also the first of its kind, this time boasting a phallic punning that is positively obscene. The better to concretize a denaturing and retributive rape by the justice system, there was a kind of chair with a hole in it that was suspended from up high, atop a large stake . . . . And then, the fire was lit, such that the flames cut right through the cords from which the contraption was suspended: thus, the chair started falling down, sliding down the length of the pole until it stopped about three feet from the ground, and remained thus until all was consumed (CPV, 4: 215–16).24

Far and away the most sinister feature of the events of 1495, though, was the legalistic spin on just what it meant to tender, anything but tenderly, the proverbial burnt offering. Philippe reports that the “scandal” had first broken “on the Friday before Palm Sunday, on the 10th day of April,” when word spread through town that the serving girl “had conceived a child and she concealed it so well that she gave birth to it all alone” on Candlemas Eve. Upon giving birth, the “poor wretch” had taken it “by the feet and hit it against a wall, and killed it. And, having done that, she took it and threw it into a well,” where the dead infant had remained until its mother transported it to a new hiding place in the outhouse.25 But the child had floated

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in the well “from the day of Candlemas to the 10th day of April,” a moment of the liturgical calendar of special significance in that Candlemas, which is observed on February 2 in the Latin rite, celebrated the purification of the mother after birth. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, Mosaic law held that “a mother who had given birth to a man-child was considered unclean for seven days; moreover she was to remain three and thirty days ‘in the blood of her purification.’” For a maid-child, however, “the time which excluded the mother from sanctuary was even doubled,” a doubling that Philippe redoubles in his own narrative. If we trust his dates and numbers, then the infant appears to have been moved from the outhouse on the sixtyseventh day, or after the exact doubling of those “three and thirty days” in which the mother was to remain in “in the blood of her purification”: Upon completion of the waiting period of forty or eighty days, and in accordance with the teachings of Leviticus 12:2–8, the mother was to “bring to the temple a lamb for a holocaust and a young pigeon or turtle dove for sin.”26 A holocaust is precisely what Metz justice had organized as the purifying catharsis of a public execution. The young mother does not appear to have brought a symbolic prop of her own but, instead, was forced to bear other symbols on her dead body; she was denied symbolic purification as she herself became a symbolic lamb to the slaughter in the pièce de résistance of 1495.27 In yet another account of the execution (this one reproduced in JeanFrançois Huguenin’s 1838 compilation of several Chronicles of the City of Metz), we encounter an explicit allusion to the conscious practice of allegorization in everyday life: “And they put a wooden child in her arms along with another painted one hanging around her neck in order to signify the crime that she had committed (en signiffiance du delit qu’elle avoit fait).”28 The macabre pun that emerges here, completely consistent with the narrative, is that, on one hand, it is difficult to imagine a more literal picture of synecdoche; while, on the other hand, a theatricalized legal penalty lays claim both to “death, really” and allegory in perpetuity. In both the person and the eradicated personhood of the convicted murderess of Metz, a community beheld a living, dying, and dead woman who was not a doll but who was being made into one in the name of the law. At the same time, they beheld a stick of wood that was reanimated as a living—and dying—victim, a piece of wood that now seems animate enough to have died and to be dying. Beyond the explicit allegorization, this was a literal enactment of the role of synecdoche itself in one of its most common applications within the larger

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metaphor of what the law does every day: proffer cases as bodily parts of the body of the state, which exemplify (through representational pictures of past actions) present and future visions of how the parts of a society must make up a civilized whole. When we then realize that the wooden doll that was used during the mortal performance at the scaffold was, in all likelihood, a Christ-doll,29 the events of 1495 all come together in such a way as to shed new light on both personification and the allegorical erasure of personhood that accompanies the ultimate penalty that is death. Important though it is to acknowledge that pictorialization, personification, and allegory are not exactly synonymous,30 if an ars memorandi is foundational to the way that medieval justice literally foresees the enactment of trial and punishment, then the execution of 1495 obliges us to look not just at foresight but at hindsight or aftersight once a mnemonic process has come full circle. Perhaps the quest for innovation at the scaffold had been driven by what Harold Bloom much later termed the “anxiety of influence”; perhaps it had been inspired by long-standing counsel from rhetoricians about the importance of eyewitnessing in forensic rhetorical procedures of transforming suspicion or probability into fact and in raising and “exciting the dead” (IO, IV, 1.28).31 But, once the curtain has fallen on the legal drama of 1495 and the malefactor is dead, standing in for, representing, incarnating all those of his or her ilk, the doll and the painting illustrate how a community reconsigns allegorical imagery (as newly stable picture) back to the memory, where, eventually, it might move again to generate something else from the ultimate stasis of death. With renewed apologies for the mixed metaphor, I submit that burning, petrifying an infanticidal mother’s criminal body is like freezing the movement of human imagines agentes. Therefore, some kind of theoretical perspective must intervene, lest we face the disturbing notion that the same system that animates a wooden stick is what petrifies a living being. Memory and allegory make the absent present and the dead speak; but, as we read in the Ad Herennium, so too does personification or prosopopoeia, which is more aptly translated as impersonation: Personification (conformatio) consists in representing an absent person as present, or in making a mute thing or one lacking form articulate, and attributing to it a definite form and a language or a certain behaviour appropriate to its character. . . . Personification may be applied to a variety of things, mute and inanimate. It is most useful in the divisions under Amplification and in Appeal to Pity. (RAH, 4.66; my emphasis)32

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The execution of 1495 renders absent victims present as well as present criminals absent and permanently silent, except when their allegorization moves them toward a pictorial stasis that is generative nevertheless of revised pictures, literal re-visions. So, at this point, anyone seeking to comprehend such events is ensnared in the bizarre chiasmus that seems endemic to the subject of allegory. The criminal has become a kind of doubly absent presence in the form of a corpse standing in for a class . . . that is to be remembered as the individual malefactor is forgotten . . . in favor of the class that, dead or alive, she has come to symbolize. But, with a bit of critical alchemy that combines Derridean crypt, Girardian ritual, Roachian surrogation, and the empty tomb of the Visitatio sepulchri, it is unclear whether allegory arranges for a doubly absent presence or a doubly present absence.33 In the end, even a theater historian must admit that, sometimes, action is not enough. In his much understudied essay on “Interpreting Drama,” Umberto Eco asks us to ponder the example of the drunken man who is picked up off the street and displayed moralistically outside a place like the Salvation Army. One need not be a theater historian to appreciate the relevance of his theory of ostension to the semiotics of theater and allegory alike. Eco notices that “the drunken man has lost his original nature of ‘real’ body among real bodies”: He has become “a semiotic device; he is now a sign, something that stands . . . for something else . . . a physical presence referring to something absent.” But, when arguing that such bodily display “de-realize[s] a given object in order to make it stand for an entire class,” Eco comes about as close as one might imagine to the allegorical essence of mnemonics—or is it the mnemonic essence of allegory? It is a matter of bringing “things absent . . . before our very eyes” (IO, VI, 2.29), which is, for Eco, a type of ostension that is “the most basic instance of performance.”34 But it is also one of the most basic instances of how medieval death penalties make meaning allegorically. The drunk on display in front of the Salvation Army is a sign because he has been made into one by someone else, by some other moralizing authority, which suggests a coercive dimension that challenges some of the more interesting claims of postmodern theater phenomenology. Bruce Wilshire contends, for example, that is impossible to stage oneself dying because the artist “cannot achieve the level of control of the subject matter necessary for such art” nor can that artist “stand outside himself as dying character and aesthetically frame and bound himself.”35 But what if he—or she—is made into an actor by the civic authorities who control the legal theater? From the Roman amphitheater to the early modern spectacle

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of the scaffold, early cultures had cultivated a coercive expertise in staging the deaths of others in such a way as to force the victims into spectacular allegorizations of themselves,36 all of which raises a key question to anyone committed to thinking allegory otherwise: Is it possible to personify a person? A person is already a person; and yet, in a nightmarish take on Austinian pretense, the likes of which inspired Jean Baudrillard to study simulation in Borges, the human symbols that were legally ostended in 1495 were “not merely like but distinctively like the genuine article simulated.”37 Ultimately, what is as troublesome to art as it is to ethics in such morbid and pitiful medieval allegories of justice is that, when living and dying coopted bodies symbolize themselves, personification becomes a literal depersonification, the violent termination of personhood. Once upon a time, Quintilian expressed his utter disgust with the lawyerly habit of “bringing into court a picture of the crime painted on wood or canvas (in tabula).” He objected that “the pleader who prefers a voiceless picture to speak for him (mutam illam effigiem) . . . must be singularly incompetent” (IO, VI, 1.32). Rhetorical pictures were meant to be speaking pictures; and allegorical performance, like the allegorical performativity of the death penalty, has a voice, regardless of whether one hears that voice on stage or off, or, following Augustine’s own conception of memory, only silently but clear as a bell inside one’s own mind in the company of one’s God: “Though my tongue be quiet, and my throat silent, yet can I sing as much as I will” (Confessions, 1: 2.10). In 1495, there were two effigies of a dead baby—a wooden doll and a painting—plus a living criminal body that underwent a forced, spectacular metamorphosis into a dead-body-aseffigy. In the United States, where the vernacular makes room for such an expression as “burned in effigy” (a practice of protest that usually targets political persons and the regimes they represent), we may now have come back to the medieval future of the legal allegorization of death. Of the extant accounts, one of the most interesting death penalties took place near the French city of Chartres in 1606; and it concerns the death sentence imposed on one Guillaume Guyard for having sodomized his (female) dog. Guillaume had been sentenced to be hanged and then “burned to ashes, along with the aforesaid bitch”; but because he had fled the jurisdiction, the sentence specified that that could happen only “if the aforesaid Guyard can be taken and apprehended in person (en sa personne).” If not, there was an allegorical alternative: “The sentence shall be executed in effigy (exécuté par effigie) by means of a painting that shall be placed and attached

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to the aforesaid gibbet (en un tableau qui sera mis et attaché).”38 Most resonant of all here is the possibility of symbolizing, allegorizing, and enacting not just death but a death wish. What, then, do we wish allegory to do in the twenty-first century? Granted, convicted murderers are no longer burned at the stake in the contemporary United States; and, with the exception of films like Errol Morris’s Mr. Death (1999), the death penalty is all so euphemistic, so antipictorial. Every now and then, there is a movie that imagines televising the death penalty, such as Witness to the Execution (1994), or a lawsuit that demands that such penalties be made visible to the public, such as KQED v. Daniel Vasquez (from 1991).39 But, for the most part, unless they are journalists, clergy, or family members of either the victim(s) or the killer(s), American citizens are not permitted access to capital punishment-in-action. Does that mean that deaths silent and unseen are meant to be forgotten? Or that we should remember the brutality of the crime and the pain of the victim but forget any American image of justice being done that is not mediated (by artists’ renderings, journalism, or other audiovisuals from the Court Television Network)? That we are meant to forget about the death penalty? Or perhaps just about the conflict that surrounds it? Or is it, rather, that, we are to seek symbolism and literalism elsewhere and otherwise? In recent crimes of infanticide, the pictorials move so quickly to the politics of abortion and to the so-called death sentences imposed on fetuses that, compared to the graphic posters that challenge cultural opinions as to whether aborted fetuses are living or not-yet-life, the medieval Messin doubling in paintings and wooden dolls starts to look like child’s play.40 Consider, for instance, the extreme literalism of the double death sentences that constitute part of the theory and practice of radical Right-to-Lifers who bomb abortion clinics illegally, enacting their latter-day lex talionis to exact murder as the righteous penalty for what they believe to be a slaughter of the innocents. And, beyond the inflammatory issue of abortion, infanticide is more likely nowadays to prompt a larger debate about postpartum depression or psychosis; whereas medieval justice would have focused on sin and redemption (and modern historians on the gendered, socioeconomic lives of the serving classes). Meanwhile, widely aired imagery of the American infanticides that scorched the collective memory—those notorious prom-queen moms who disposed of their children in toilets and trash cans; the sequential, psychotically methodical murders by Andrea Yates of her five children41—have directed our sights unceasingly to the pathos of

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the victims, as evoked by the ubiquitous family photographs of the smiling Yates children. In addition to the loss of Philippe’s “beautiful repentance” (Gedenk­buch, 124) or of the Digest’s cathartic solacio at the scaffold,42 something else has been lost as well. Medieval legal culture hyped its deadly visuals, and Philippe de Vigneulles recorded innovation after innovation at the scaffold, all designed to consign and reconsign allegories of justice to the collective memory: pictures of the living dead and the dead-no-longer-living. So it is a most curious thing that, when the United States, or one of its state governments, executes someone, medieval spectacle is replaced by an invisible rhetoric of exemplarity that recasts, in line with the symbol-making advent of modernity, contemporary punishments as not cruel and unusual. Needless to say, I am by no means singling out certain modes of execution as worthy recipients of our praise. Far from it. But, at the very least, there is an honesty that attends the theatrics of medieval cruelty that renders its modern descendants all the more bizarre, especially as mediated—literally—by the media. If allegory is saying one thing and meaning another, then what are we to make of the fact that we actually see death all the time on television: in spectacles of terrorism that look more like snuff films, in such events as the airing of the Kevorkian-assisted suicide of Thomas Youk on 60 Minutes in 1998, the endlessly reaired death screams of Nicole Brown Simpson during her call to 911, the attacks on the Twin Towers, or hostages pleading for their lives in Afghanistan or Iraq as a prelude to executions that are apparently shown by Al-Jazeera but not by U.S. news outlets.43 What, moreover, are we to make of the U.S. government’s authorization (in the person of Donald Rumsfeld) of the mass media dissemination on Al-Jazeera of the dead bodies of the sons of Saddam Hussein, Uday and Qusay? American networks carried the story and projected the images of the dead, supposedly as a point of information, the better to demonstrate to an American audience just what it is that a lawless people needs to see in order to believe.44 If pictorialization of punishment is for the so-called Third World, the message seems to be that, at least in part, barbarians need the concrete— not the allegorical or the symbolic—and that, above all, it is the United States that has the monopoly on symbol making, on allegorization. Showing not a symbol but an instantaneously recognizable dead body that is itself and itself only is perfectly consistent with the symbol-making needs of the projectors of the image: projectors who insist that such ocular proof

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is necessary only to a barbaric people in desperate need of the enduring freedom made possible by the infinite justice provided by those who read invasion as liberation. In that ultimate allegorization, even killing is not murder—it never is when authorized by the state. Instead, it is memorable justice, it is the reallegorization of an allegory that no one ever wanted to acknowledge in the first place. We are not so far here from the advent of what Hans Robert Jauss called “the aesthetics of the verisimile,” which constituted “a historical way [to] . . . resurrect and legitimize the here and now” while transforming the imaginary into the real (QA, 4–6; his emphasis). What looks like the opposite of allegory is the greatest allegory of all: the revisionary justice of revisionist history, as embraced by the Middle Ages as it is concealed today, and as medieval as it ever was.

appendix 1. La Chronique de Philippe de Vigneulles, ed. Bruneau, 3: 337–338; my emphasis. Une fille bruslée par justices.—En ce meisme tamps, le vandredi devant les Paulme, Xe jour d’apvril, advint en Mets une aultre esclandre. Car à ce jour fut accusée une josne fille, eaigée de XVIII ans, qui servoit Piéron des Mollin, le viez. Le cas fut telz que celle jonne fille, elle estant en cest eaige, avoit conceus ung anffans; et le cella tellement qu’elle l’enfanta toutte seulle. Puis la pouvre dollante, mal advisée, le print par les piedz et le frappait contre ung mur, et le tuay; et, ce fait, le gectait en ung puis qui estoit en la maison que ledit Piéron tenoit decost Saint Anthonne sus les mollin, là où il faisoient la servoize (car ledit Piéron estoit guernetier de la ville). Et y fut cest anffans depuis le jour de la Chandelleur jusques au Xe jours d’apvril. Auquelle jour les brasseurs qui bressoient la servoize en la dicte maison vollurent essaier ce qu’ilz n’avoient encor fait, c’est assavoir se l’yawe dudit puis seroit bonne à faire servoise; et, après la conclusion donnée, acomansairent à tirer de celle yawe. Mais incontinant ont veu l’anffans sur l’yawe, lequelle flottoit et négeoit. Dont il ont estés bien esbahis; toutteffois, il n’en ont fais aulcuns semblant, et ont délibérés de le celler tant que leur maistre Pierron seroit revenus de la pourcession. Mais, durant qu’il en devisoient, la fille les acoutoit; par quoy, incontinant qu’il ce/fussent pertis du lieu, elle

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ce desvallait au cellier, et, par une fenestre qui respondoit au puis, avec un rètez, elle print l’enffant, et le allait gecter en une courtoise. Et, quant ledit Piéron fut revenus, son nepveulx, le jonne Pierron, luy dist et contait comment en leur puis y avoit ung anffans; et, de fait, luy voult aller monstrer: mais il n’y trouvèrent riens. Et alors commencèrent à serchier par toutte la maison; et, à la fin, fut l’anffans trouvés dedans la corthoise. Incontinant la fille fut prinse et emmenée. Et, tantost le mardi après, elle fut mise on pillory; puis fut menée entre les deux pont. Et là on avoit fait ung angiens, non pas à la coustume des aultre: car la dicte fille estoit toutte droitte ellevée en hault et contre ung grant pal. Et, tout premièrement, olt l’une des mains couppées; et puis on bouttait le feu, et fut arse et brûllée: non pas que l’on la laissait consumer; car, incontinant qu’elle fût morte, on estindait le feu, et demourait toutte droitte, qui estoit hideuse chose à veoir. Et lui mist on ung anffans de boix entre ces bras, avec ung aultres en pointure.

2. Philippe de Vigneulles, Gedenkbuch, ed. Michelant, 124. En celluy meisme temps par ung jour du grant mairdy de la grant semaigne de caresme, l’an iiij.xx et xv fut fait justice devant les pons de Mets d’une jonne fille eaigée de xiij ans, laquelle demouroit en l’ostel le gros Pieron des Mollins. Et fut la dite jonne fille menée au pillory depuis les x heures jusques aux ij heures, comme la coustume en est; et puis fut menée devant les pons et eust illec l’une des mains coupées et puis, celay fait, fut brulée et airse, non pas comme on art les aultres, car elle estoit haulte elevée, et incontinent qu’elle fut morte on estaindait le feu et fut mis son corps sus une rue; et luy mist-on emprès d’elle ung petit enffant de bois; et avoit encor avec cela ung aultre grant paipier, atachié à la dite rue, auquel avoit ung enffant en pointure et sa mère qui le tuoit. Et tout ce fut fait pourtant, que la powre jonne fille avoit esté engrossie d’ung mairchant estrangier et avoit tousjour nié à sa maitresse, qu’elle ne le seoit point; et une nuit qu’elle estoit en son lit, entour la chandelleur, devant qu’elle fut détruite, elle acouchait toute à par elle; mais avant que l’enfant fût du tout à monde, elle l’empougnait par la teste et le tirait dehors, puis le ruait en terre et le tuait, et le gairdait soubz son lit en des drapiaulz jusques au lendemain. Et le lendemain elle le ruait en ungne cisterne, qui estoit en ung cellier, où l’on ne tiroit guère souvent de l’yave. Mais de cop de fortune y eust un gairxon de léans, qui besoingnoit aulcune chose au cellier et voult regairder à la cisterne et le vit et le monstrait à ung sien compaignon; mais ils ne savoient au vray que ce fût. Cy le tirèrent

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dehors et trouvirent que c’estoit ung enffant, et ainsy qu’ils le tiroient hors de l’iawe, la fille vint au cellier et le print en son giron et le cuidait cacher et s’en cuidoit fouir; mais incontinent fut acusée à justice et fut prinse et brulée, comme vous aves oy, et souffrit grant tourment. Dieu luy pardont ses faultes et nous les nostres, car elle eust une belle repentance en la fin.

3. Les Chroniques de la ville de Metz, ed. Huguenin, 604–605. Le vendredi devant les palmes, qui fut le dixiesme jour d’apvril, on fist la procession à Sainct Clement de la victoire heue contre l’entreprinse faicte par le duc Nicollais de Loraine sus la cité; et à icelle y eult moult de gens, car il faisoit beaul temps. Ledit jour meisme, fut accusée une jonne fille, aigée de dix huict ans, qui servoit le viez Pierron, clerc des ouvrages des mollins sus Muzelle, laquelle estoit enceinte d’enffant; et, par seduction et temptation de l’ennemi / d’enffer, de la vigille de la Chandelleur qu’elle eult son mal d’enffant, sans sonner mot ne appeller personne, elle enffanta toutte seulle et tira elle meisme l’enffant hors de son ventre, comme elle le congneut et gehit à justice. Apres, ceste pouvre dollente, mal advisée print ledit enffant par les piedz, le fraippa contre ung mur et l’assomma; puis, ce fait, le mist dessoubz le chevet de son lict jusques au lundemain. Quant son maistre et sa maistresse estoient à l’eglise, elle print l’enffant et le pourta en une maison de coste l’hostel St Anthoine sus Muzelle, en laquelle ladicte servante et sondit maistre et maistresse estoient souvent, pourtant que en icelle on y vendoit la servoise pour la cité et en estoit vendeur ledit Pierron et grainetier de la ville, et gecta ledit enffant au puix de ladicte maison. Et y fut depuis le jour de la Chandelleur jusques au dixiesme jour d’apvril, que les brasseurs de servoise allont en ladicte maison et vouloient mettre du grant gervier pour faire de la servoise. Et l’ung d’eulx se advisa et dist: Il y a ici ceans ung puix: si l’yawe estoit bonne et nette, ce nous feroit ung grant plaisir; et y allont veoir avec une chandoille et virent l’enffant qui estoit au dessus de l’yawe, dont ilz furent bien esbahis. Toutesfois ilz conclurent qu’ilz n’en feroient nul semblant, et le cellont tant que leur maistre fut revenu de la procession à l’hostel. Mais durant qu’ilz en devisoient entre eulx, la servante les escoutoit secretement. Et quant elle entendit que c’estoit de l’enffant qu’ilz devisoient, qui estoit au puix, incontinent qu’ilz furent partis, elle se devalla au cellier et par une fenestre qui respondoit au puix, pour estre plus pres de l’yawe, avec ung ratel elle print l’enffant et le alla getteir en la cortoise de ladicte

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maison. Et quant ledit Pierron fut revenu, son nepveu, le jonne Pierron, qui le servoit, luy dist et conta comment qu’ilz avoient veu ung enffant en leur puix et luy voult aller monstreir; mais ilz n’y trouvont rien. Si commencerent à cerchier par toutte la maison, et à la fin fut trouvé l’enffant getté en la cortoise et le tiront hors. De quoy ledit Pierron en avertit justice qui fist apprehendeir ladicte servante qui cogneust incontinent son cas. Et le mairdy elle fut mise au pillory, puis fut menée entre les deux ponts; et là on avoit fait ung engien, non pas à la coustume des aultres; car ladicte fille estoit toutte droicte, eslevée en hault contre ung grant pal et liée. Et eult premierement l’une des mains coppée; puis on boutta le feu, tant qu’elle fut arse et estouffée, non pas que l’on la laissast toutte consumer; car incontinent qu’elle fut morte on esteindit le feu; et là demeura toutte droicte; qui estoit chose hideuse à veoir. Et luy mist on ung enffant de boix entre ses bras avec ung aultre en peinture, pendu au col, en signiffiance du delit qu’elle avoit fait: et fut la main qu’on luy avoit coppée, clouée au pal où elle estoit attaichée.

4. Sentence pronounced by the Mayor of Loens de Chartres, 12 September 1606. Cited in E. P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, 296–297; his emphasis. . . . Veu le procès criminel, charges et informations, décret de prise de corps, adjournement à troys briefs jours, les dicts trois deffaulx, le dict quart d’habondant, le recollement des dicts témoings et recognaissance faicte par les dicts témoings de la chienne dont est question, les conclusions dudict procureur, tout veu et eu sur ce conseil, nous disant que lesdicts troys deffaulx et quart d’habondant ont esté bien donnés pris et obtenus contre ledict Guyard accusé, attainct et convaincu. . . . Pour réparation et punition duquel crime condempnons ledict Guyard estre pendu et estranglé à une potence qui, pour cest effet, sera dressée aux lices du Marché aux Chevaux de ceste ville de Chartres, au lieu et endroict où les dict sieurs ont tout droit de justice. Et auparavant ladicte exécution de mort, que ladicte chienne sera assommée par l’exécuteur de la haute justice audict lieu, et seront les corps morts, tant dudict Guyard que de la dicte chienne brûlés et mis en cendres, si le dict Guyard peut estre pris et apprehendé en sa personne, sy non pour le regard du dict Guyard, sera la sentence exécuté [sic] par effigie en un tableau qui sera mis et attaché à ladicte potence, et déclarons tous et chascuns ses biens acquis et confisqués à qui il appartiendra, sur cieux préalablement pris la somme de cent cinquante

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livres d’amende que nous avons adjugées auxdicts sieurs, sur laquelle somme seront pris les fraicts de justice. Prononcé et exécuté par effigie, pour le regard du dict Guyard les jour et an cy dessus. Signé Guyot. Notes 1.  La Chronique de Philippe de Vigneulles, hereafter CPV, ed. Charles Bruneau, 4 vols. (Metz: Société d’histoire de d’archéologie de la Lorraine, 1927–1933): 3: 338; my emphasis; and see also Bruneau’s helpful biography of Philippe (1: i–xv). For the complete passage, which I reproduce as is (notwithstanding Philippe’s bizarre orthography), see Appendix 1. All translations from the French are mine unless otherwise indicated. Bodily dismemberment (cutting off the hands) was a conventional medieval punishment to which we return below; and it is familiar to specialists of the medieval theater, e.g., in the symbolic dismemberment of the Croxton Play of the Sacrament. See David Bevington’s edition of that play in Medieval Drama (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1975): 754–788; at 772–773. Finally, while the subject lies beyond the scope of this study, the closest modern analog to this practice is to be found in the hideous U.S. legacy of the (extralegal) lynching; see, e.g., Harvey Young’s superb—and supremely disturbing “The Black Body as Souvenir in American Lynching,” Theatre Journal 57.4 (2005): 639–657. 2.  Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977): esp. chaps. 1 and 2. 3.  De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988): 140. The law, however, does not write or engrave; people do. 4.  “Famosos latrones in his locis, ubi grassati sunt, furca figendos compluribus placuit, ut et conspectu dettereantur alii ab isdem facinoribus et solacio sit cognatis et adfinibus interemptorum eodem loco poena reddita, in quo latrones homicidia fecissent,” Digesta, in Corpus iuris civilis, ed. T. Mommsen (Berlin, 1877): 2: bk. 48.19.28.15; my emphasis; trans. Alan Watson, The Digest of Justinian, hereafter DJ, eds. Theodor Mommsen, Paul Krueger; 2 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985). 5.  Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Francis Golffing (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956): 192. I discuss the medieval resonance of that passage in The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence, hereafter MTOC (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), chap. 2. 6.  Here I paraphrase Peter Brook, The Empty Space (Middlesex, U.K.: Penguin, 1972): 136; as ably discussed by Stanton B. Garner Jr., Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and Performance in Contemporary Drama (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994): 161. 7.  Plato, Laws, 2 vols., ed. and trans. R. G. Bury, Loeb Classical Library (1926; rpt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942): 1: 663b–c.

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8.  While it is not our present focus, justice hardly seems the appropriate term for the punishment inflicted on a number of infanticidal mothers in Metz: Oftentimes, their offspring were stillborn, or they were the issue of rape. I discuss several such incidents in “Theater Makes History: Ritual Murder by Proxy in the Mistere de la Sainte Hostie,” Speculum 79 (2004): 991–1016. On self-signification, I draw on Umberto Eco, “Interpreting Drama,” in The Limits of Interpretation, 101–110 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), to which we return shortly. On the theater of everyday life, see, in addition to de Certeau, Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (1982; rpt. New York: PAJ, 1992): esp. 102–123; Alan Read, Theatre and Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993); and Angus Fletcher on “symbolic action” in Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964): chap. 3. 9.  Folklorists also use ostension to denote what we call, in the vernacular, copycat crimes. See William Ellis, “Death by Folklore: Ostension, Contemporary Legend, and Murder,” Western Folklore 48 (1989): 201–220. The theatricality of legal rhetoric is the subject of my Rhetoric and the Origins of Medieval Drama, hereafter ROMD, Rhetoric and Society, 1 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992): esp. chaps. 1 and 2. For Artaud, I refer, of course, to The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1958). 10.  For the relevance of surrogacy to theater studies, see Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996): defined at 2–3; and pioneered by René Girard in his groundbreaking Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977): esp. chap. 3. 11.  Such canonical formulations as “The State vs. John Doe,” where “The State” stands in for the community, are explored in Law’s Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law, ed. Peter Brooks and Paul Gewirtz (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). See esp. the editors’ own contributions, Gewirtz, “Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law,” 2–13; and Brooks, “The Law as Narrative and Rhetoric,” 14–22. 12.  Robert Zemeckis could hardly have anticipated the 23 million spins (as of fall 2006 on Google) on his Back to the Future (1985). 13.  See the famous Augustinian mnemonic conflation of visions past, present, and future in Confessions, ed. and trans. William Watts, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950): 2: bk. 11, chap. 11. 14.  [Cicero], Ad C. Herennium, hereafter RAH, ed. and trans. Harry Caplan, Loeb Classical Library (1954; rpt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977): 4.46. On the availability in France of the RAH as early as the eleventh century, see Jules Alexandre Clerval, Les Écoles de Chartres au Moyen-Âge du Ve au XVIe siècle (Chartres, France: Selleret, 1895): 115–117. 15.  In spite of such ambitious treatments of the subject as Wayne C. Booth’s A Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); C. Jan Swearingen,

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Rhetoric and Irony: Western Literacy and Western Lies (New York and Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), that literary mode has yet to receive the full critical treatment that it deserves in medieval studies. To this day, Martha Bayless’s Parody in the Middle Ages: The Latin Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996) remains one of the few studies that even attempts it. 16.  Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988): 126. 17.  Drawing on the groundbreaking work of Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966) and Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990), I make that argument esp. in MTOC, chap. 2. 18.  I coined that term in ROMD, 4–18. 19.  See Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985): chap 2; and also, for theater’s “re-production” and unrepeatability, see Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969): 220; also discussed by Read, Theatre of Everyday Life, 15. 20.  Gedenkbuch des Metzer Bürgers Philippe von Vigneulles aus den Jahren 1471– 1522, ed. Heinrich Michelant (Stuttgart, 1852; rpt. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1968): 124; my emphasis. See below, Appendix 2. 21.  Quintilian, Institutio oratoria, hereafter IO, ed. and trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols., Loeb Classical Library (1920; rpt. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980): VI, 2.29; and 1.31; my emphasis. 22.  The phrase from Quintilian appears in IO, IV, 1.28; in MTOC, 71–82, I argue that rhetorical theory calls for death as “preimaginative” mnemonic resurrection. See also Patrick J. Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). 23.  “Le clerc eust premier les deux mains coppées, et puis la teste; et fut le pétal duquel il avoit fait le copt pandus et estaichiés en hault, contre la lance et a plus près d’icelle teste,” CPV, 3: 34. Given that a pétal or pétard was a small explosive device (firecracker, bomb, mine, or the like), it is difficult to know what precisely would have been left to display next to the man’s decapitated head. I thank Jack Talbott for his insight into French military history; and I treat this long narrative of over 1,000 words (3: 33–35) in an essay in progress entitled “Marital Rape and the Medieval Theater of Everyday Life.” Compare also with the version in the Chroniques de la ville de Metz, recueillies, mises en ordre et publiées pour la première fois: Le Doyen de St Thiébault.—Jean Aubrion.—Philippe de Vigneulles.— Praillon.—Annales Messines, etc., 900–1552, hereafter CVM, ed. Jean-François Huguenin (Metz: S. Lamort, 1838): 413–414. 24.  “Et estoit cest angiens en manier d’ugne chayre trouées, laquelle fut pandue en hault encontre ung grant paul. . . . et puis l’on alumait le feu, lequel couppait tantost la corde à quoy pandoit cest angiens: par quoy la chayre cheut en xaillant

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et s’avallant au loing du paul jusques à trois piedz près de terre, et demourait ainssy jusques que tout fût consumés.” One cannot help but make the transumptive rhetorical move to the contemporary, vulgar vernacular, which would have the woman being “screwed right back over” by the justice system. 25.  As the site of infamy of countless antisemitic legends, the outhouse is one of the principal foci of my “Theater Makes History;” and it is well worth emphasizing here the logic of hiding a corpse in any locus (outhouses, charnel houses) where it would be overwhelmed by other stenches. See, of course, the exemplary work on medieval antisemitism by Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); and David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). Regarding the events of 1495, there are significant variations even in the three accounts under discussion; but all involve dissemblance, concealment, and pretense. In the Chronicles, the body of the child is discovered in the well by a group of brewers, whom the girl overhears: She fishes the child out with a net and proceeds to hide the body in the outhouse, where it is eventually discovered by a search party. In the Gedenkbuch, the tiny corpse is discovered simply by happenstance, a coup de fortune by which a young boy happens to be in the cellar: He fishes out the child, after which he is apparently confronted by the girl, who takes the corpse and attempts unsuccessfully to flee. Compare the three accounts in Appendices 1, 2, and 3. 26.  “Candlemas,” Catholic Encyclopedia. For a literary perspective on the matter, see Peggy McCracken, “Engendering Sacrifice: Blood, Lineage, and Infanticide in Old French Literature,” Speculum 77 (2002): 55–75. 27.  In addition to the passage from the DJ cited above, the term catharsis has fascinating medical connotations of purifying purgation, which have been explored, e.g., by Andrzej Szczeklik, Catharsis: On the Art of Medicine, trans. Antonia LloydJones (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). The full connotations of holocaust as burnt offering are attested in Old French as early as the twelfth century. 28.  CVM, ed. Huguenin (cited above, note 23): 605; my emphasis; see below Appendix 3. 29.  See Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “Holy Dolls: Play and Piety in Florence in the Quattrocento,” chap. 14 of Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Florence, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). I thank Elina Gertsman for bringing that work to my attention. 30.  W. T. H. Jackson, e.g., rightly stresses the debt of allegory to personification; but he insists that the latter is not the “decisive step” in allegorization, which occurs “when the personified abstractions become the only participants in the action or when the appearance of human beings is confined to the participation of the author himself or his persona” (The Challenge of the Medieval Text: Studies in Genre and Interpretation, ed. Joan M. Ferrante and Robert W. Hanning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985): 160; his emphasis). 31.  I make that argument in MTOC, 28–38. See also Quintilian on eyewitnessing (IO, IV, 2.123); Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical

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Evidence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); and Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1975). 32.  “Conformatio est cum aliqua quae non adest persona confingitur quasi adsit, aut cum res muta aut informis fit eloquens, et forma ei et oratio adtribuitur ad dignitatem adcommodata aut actio quaedam. . . . Haec conformatio licet in plures res, in mutas atque inanimas transferatur. Proficit plurimum in amplificationis partibus et commiseratione.” Harry Caplan translates prosopopoeia as “personification” (RAH, 4.66) and notes that “representing an absent person as present would not today be regarded as strictly within the meaning of Personification” (398n). In his translation of Quintilian, however, Butler prefers to translate prosopopoeia as “impersonation,” as do I (ROMD, 56–57): see, e.g., IO, VI, 1.25). 33.  See Girard, Violence and the Sacred, chaps. 1–3; Peggy Kamuf’s work on Derrida’s Fors in Fictions of Feminine Desire: Disclosures of Heloise (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982): xi; Anthony Kubiak’s brilliant reading of the quem quaeritis trope in Stages of Terror: Terrorism, Ideology, and Coercion as Theatre History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991): 48–59; and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003): esp. the (unnumbered) chapter, “Epiphany/ Presentification/Deixis.” 34.  In addition to Eco, “Interpreting Drama,” 102–103; my emphasis; see also, on the subject of derealization, Hans Robert Jauss’s analysis of the work of Wolfgang Iser (esp. The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology. [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993]), in Question and Answer: Forms of Dialogic Understanding, hereafter QA, trans. Michael Hays, Theory and History of Literature 68 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989): 10. 35.  Wilshire, Role Playing and Identity: The Limits of Theatre as Metaphor (1982; rpt. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991): 251; 268. 36.  See Shadi Bartsch, Actors in the Audience: Theatricality and Doublespeak from Nero to Hadrian, Revealing Antiquity, 6 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994): chap. 1. 37.  See J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers, ed. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock, 2nd ed. (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon, 1970): 214, his emphasis; and also Baudrillard on Borges in Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Mark Poster (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988): 166–167. 38.  E. P. Evans reproduces this text in The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals: The Lost History of Europe’s Animal Trials (1906; rpt. London: Faber and Faber, 1988): 296–297; and, for his English translation, 148; my emphasis. See also Appendix 4. One can only wonder about the content of the depositions from “those who testified on behalf of the bitch”; I discuss this bizarre legislation in “Homicidal Pigs and the Antisemitic Imagination,” Exemplaria 14.1 (2002): 201–238. 39.  For a brilliant analysis of that trial, see Wendy Lesser, Pictures at an Execution: An Inquiry into the Subject of Murder (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993): chap. 2.

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40.  The politics of abortion is not a purely modern concept, and its punishment was detailed in the Digest of Justinian. See, e.g., the explanation about the “bad example” set by “those who administer an abortifacient or aphrodisiac” (2: 48.19.38.5); and the death sentence of “a certain woman of Miletus [who] had . . . been condemned for a capital offense because . . . she herself aborted her own child with drugs” (2: 48.19.39). 41.  I discuss both cases in “Theater Makes History.” 42.  For that solacio, see DJ, 2: 48.19.28.15; cited above, note 4. 43.  See Mark Juergensmeyer on the “Theater of Terror,” chap. 7 of Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). I discuss such incidents Murder by Accident: Theater, Medievalism, and Critical Intentions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009): 185–190. 44.  “U.S. Releases Photos Said to Show Saddam’s Sons’ Bodies: Many Iraqis Want Proof That Uday, Qusay Were Killed,” July 24, 2003. Retrieved on July 28, 2007, from: CNN.com.

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The Mask of Copernicus and the Mark of the Compass Bruno, Galileo, and the Ontology of the Page daniel selcer For the more distant the means of imitation from the imitated thing, the more marvelous the imitation will be. g a l i l e o t o c i g l o (June 26, 1612)1

In Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (1632), Galileo mounts the stage of “the theater of the world” to defend and modify the position of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus (1543).2 On the second day of Galileo’s dialogue, his filiation takes a particularly complex form. Salviati (the Copernican character) announces that he must tell Sagredo (the undecided character): That I act the part of Copernicus in our arguments and wear his mask. As to the internal effects upon me of the arguments which I produce in his favor, I want you to be guided not by what I say when we are in the heat of acting out our play, but after I have put off the costume, for perhaps then you shall find me different from what you saw of me on the stage.3

What exactly does it mean to wear the mask of Copernicus, and what differences can we expect when Salviati removes it? In Galileo’s text they will involve better descriptions of the shape of the orbits of the planets; more precise measures of their sizes, speeds, and locations; the inclusion of an account of the moons of Jupiter, to be sure; all based on the radically more accurate observations made possible by Galileo’s telescopes. From a scientific perspec-

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tive, these are all important costume changes. But from a philosophical and rhetorical one, we might ask whether Galileo’s Salviati ever removes his mask and inquire into its theatrical and allegorical character. If Galileo can take up and put down the mask of Copernicus, could another have worn it before him? Would this be the petrified death mask of a long-dead Polish mathematical astronomer (his imago), or would it be an emblem of “the general structure of the universe” Copernicus asserted that book to contained?4 This essay examines the mobilization of allegory in Galileo’s Dialogo, comparing it with a slightly earlier dialogical defense of Copernicus in Giordano Bruno’s La Cena de le Ceneri (1584).5 I use these texts to explore the alle­gorical afterlife of a cosmological diagram produced by Copernicus (Figure 3.1)

Figure 3.1.  Nicholas Copernicus, De revolutionibus orbium cœlestium (Nuremberg: Ioh. Petreium, 1543), fol. 9v. Shelf-mark fGC5 C7906.543d, by permission of Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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Figure 3.2.  Giordano Bruno, La Cena de le Ceneri ([London]: [J. Charlewood], 1584), 98. Shelf-mark STC 3935, by permission of Houghton Library, Harvard University.

then reproduced, transformed, and disfigured by Bruno (Figure 3.2) and Galileo (Figure 3.3).6 I analyze the theatrical scenes for the inscription of this diagram in Cena and the Dialogo, arguing that they can be understood productively in terms of allegory and that neither the diagram nor these texts’ dialogical forms can be reduced to mere ornamentation or illustration.7 In his Piercean critique of both platonic realism and Husserlian phenomenology dealing with a related diagrammatic context (mathematics rather than cosmography), Brian Rotman emphasizes the corporeal and confrontational function of diagrams. “They are created and maintained as entities and attain significance only in relation to human visual-kinetic presence,” he claims, and they “call attention to the materiality of all signs and the corporeality of those who manipulate them.”8 From a very different

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Figure 3.3.  Galileo Galilei, Dialogo dei massimi sistemi (Florence: Gio Battista Landini, 1632), 320. Shelf-mark *90W-88, by permission of Houghton Library, Harvard University.

perspective, Reviel Netz’s historical account of the practices surrounding the function of diagrams in ancient Greek mathematics denies the severability of diagram from proof and argues that “neither makes sense without the other” because “the diagram sets up a world of reference, which delimits the text” such that “each geometrical proposition sets up its own universe— which is its diagram.” The diagram thus functions, Netz argues, as “the metonym of the [geometrical] proposition.”9 Like Rotman, I emphasize the process of corporealization inherent in the construction of scientific diagrams. I demonstrate that this embodiment—much more complicated than a simple act of cognitive representation—is central not only for diagrammatic signs and their manipulators, but also for what Netz calls their “material implementation” on the pages of the texts in which they are ­inscribed.10

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Unlike Netz’s reading of diagrams in ancient Greek mathematics, I propose that these early modern cosmographical diagrams are inseparable not only from the materiality of the book-apparatus in which they appear but also from the allegorical staging of their inscription on the page and the act of reading that inscription demands.11 In what follows, I begin with the scene of the reproduction of Copernicus’s diagram in Galileo’s Dialogo, examining it in relation to Galileo’s implicit and explicit theories of allegory. I then take up the diagram’s problematic prefiguration in Bruno’s Cena and the discussion of allegory to which it is linked. I conclude by arguing that these scenes of dramatized diagrammatic inscription and associated theories of allegory exemplify a shift within philosophical and scientific discourse of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries toward the materialization and naturalization of allegorical language. My focus is on the way that Bruno’s and Galileo’s texts frame their diagrams as products of dramatized conjunctions among the bodies of their characters armed with paper, ink, compasses, imaginary copies of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus, and the pages of the texts in which they all appear. My problem is to describe the impact of allegory within philosophical discourse on what I will call the baroque ontology of the page.12

‘l e t t h is pag e be t h e e nor mous e x pa nse of the universe . . . ’ The production of many of the diagrams located within the pages of the Dialogo are described in the text itself as Salviati, Sagredo, and Simplicio wield ink, paper, and compasses in an effort to develop their geometrical and cosmological positions. The story of one diagram they draw (the most famous in the book) is especially important both for the manner of its inscription and the way it locates Galileo’s text in a particular iconographic and allegorical tradition. On the third day of the dialogue, Salviati sketches his familiar argument that not only Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury have the sun as the center of their celestial rotation, but Earth does as well; furthermore, the moon orbits Earth and accompanies it in its annual rotation around the sun. Simplicio is puzzled by Salviati’s position and proposes that he will “understand it better from the drawing of a diagram, which might make it easier to discuss.” “That shall be done,” Salviati answers,

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But for your greater satisfaction and your astonishment, too, I want you to draw it yourself. You will see that however firmly you believe yourself not to understand it you do so perfectly, and just by answering my questions you will describe it exactly. So take a sheet of paper and a compass; let this page be the enormous expanse of the universe in which you have to distribute or arrange its parts as reason shall direct you.13

The diagram they draw (Figure 3.3), of course, is Galileo’s modification of one that appears in Copernicus’s De revolutionibus (Figure 3.1).14 The dramatic inscription of Galileo’s diagram takes the form of an an­ am­netic exercise in figurative recollection. As in Plato’s Meno, careful questioning by a philosopher elicits a grasp of concepts figured as already present in the mind of the one questioned, who by his own hand inscribes a diagrammatic figure that presents them coherently.15 Indeed, Galileo’s text frames the production of the diagram as the construction of a conceptual anteriority and thus as a process of figuration meant to call forth a form of understanding already possessed by Simplicio despite his denials. The Dialogo materializes this production of natural philosophical knowledge: This form of recollection requires not just mathematical reflection and observational acuity, but paper, ink, and a compass (Plato’s Socrates, of course, must still have been equipped with sand and a stick of some sort). It also requires allegory, as Salviati establishes a series of signifying correspondences among discourses of different orders; the page is the enormous expanse of the universe, the circles are the celestial rotations, and the marks are particular planets. But if this scene is indeed allegorical, it is certainly rather flat compared to the figurative richness of other Renaissance literary, emblematic, and artistic allegories. Even in relation to the work of Galileo’s contemporary cosmographer Kepler, it is all but tropologically void.16 At the same time, the scene evokes precisely the anterior temporalization of a set of spatial relations that Paul de Man, for example, describes as the mark of the allegorical.17 Further, the text’s refusal to allow the diagram to stand as a mere illustration (as does its Copernican original) means that it is produced only through a series of activities undertaken by general personifications of particular systems of the world. Salviati wears the mask not only of Copernicus but also of Copernican cosmology; Simplicio wears that of the Ptolemaic system; and Sagredo in his indecision and contemplative openness wears the mask of the philosophically inclined reader of Galileo’s text. Yet what of Galileo’s explicit accounts of the role of allegorical language in the pursuit of natural philosophy? Galileo famously rejects allegorical

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figuration as a basis for the expression of scientific truth, so in what sense can a positive and interpretively productive role for allegory be asserted of the Dialogo? Galileo in fact articulates three distinct topoi for the mobilization of allegory—what I will call the theological, poetic-aesthetic, and textual fields—associating each with a particular form of linguistic and conceptual catachresis. Theological allegory involves the extension of a series of metaphors from the scriptural to the philosophical sphere. Its misuse, Galileo argues, involves its mislocation. Theological allegory is acceptable (and even necessary) when scriptural language is framed as the metaphorical figuration of a natural world that it can neither contain nor express directly. To reverse this relationship (as did many early modern theologians) and claim that a true description of the natural world is one that allegorizes divine revelation, on the other hand, is to render theological allegory dangerous and mistaken. Poetic-aesthetic allegory, by contrast, structures literary texts and aesthetic objects in such a way as to render them receptacles of a meaning that transcends their direct signification or material instantiation. Galileo attacks such allegory on philosophical rather than stylistic grounds, insisting that it reduces words and images to structural bearers of allusion and obfuscation, thereby depriving art of its capacity to express concepts and narratives. Finally, textual allegory involves the conflation of literary works and the discourse of natural philosophical observation and demonstration or, more precisely, the subordination of natural philosophy to the domain of literature. Here, Galileo objects, observational acuity and theoretical systematization become nothing more than yet another trope in one more complicated rhetorical series. Most crucially, as we shall see, Galileo holds that such allegory leaves the world behind as it transforms natural philosophical thinking into textual research subordinated to practices of authorial legitimization. In his frequent attempts to defend the Copernican hypothesis against charges of heresy, Galileo restricts the legitimate use of allegory to scriptural interpretation (and thus to the theological sphere), reserving an unqualified literality for accounts of natural phenomena based on sensory observation and demonstrative reasoning. In the face of suggestions that Copernicus must have intended his account of the structure of reality as a suppositional construct meant merely to save appearances, Galileo objects that only one who has never actually read the pages of De revolutionibus could hold such a position.18 When it comes to charges of contradiction between biblical passages and the Copernican hypothesis, Galileo is nev-

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ertheless willing to frame himself as an unapologetic scriptural allegorian, arguing (implicitly in some texts and explicitly in others) from Augustinian principles distinguishing between literal and allegorical readings.19 When biblical claims conflict with those of observational experience and rational investigation, Galileo holds, the words of scripture must be taken allegorically, whereas “in discussions of physical problems we ought to begin not from the authority of scriptural passages, but from sense-experiences and necessary demonstrations.”20 Galileo thus legitimates the discursive standing of theological allegory but only insofar as it is used to displace the literality of scriptural “truth” into the realm of allegorical signs so as to reconcile theology with the results of natural observation and rational proof. “To be accommodated to the understanding of every man” sacralized language can “speak many things which appear to differ from the absolute truth so far as the bare meaning of the words is concerned.” Nature, by contrast, “is inexorable and immutable, never violates the terms of the laws imposed upon her, and does not care whether or not her recondite reasons and ways of operation are disclosed to the human understanding.”21 Thus, as Eileen Reeves points out, while Galileo is willing to adopt the Augustinian allegorical framework, he reverses its semiological hierarchy such that slippery biblical passages now allegorize an immutable natural world. Natural phenomena are no longer “the visible index of scripture”; rather, scriptural passages “become a gloss on what Galileo saw as a more permanent text, the physical Book of the Heavens.”22 In other words, what Galileo gives with one hand he takes with the other. The condition for the legitimization of allegorical language is its restriction to the theological sphere. The first misuse of allegory—catachrestic theological allegorization—is thus the illegitimate displacement of allegorical interpretation from the discourse of theology to that of natural philosophy. This involves a practice of reading that extends allegorical language beyond its proper sphere and thereby mistakes the language of nature for a concatenation of signs ineluctably pointing to the veracity of scripture, while in fact only the reverse may be admitted. It is true that Galileo’s willingness to describe his expositions of the Copernican model as necessary or empirical demonstrations rather than conditional hypotheses varied with the intensity of the political and cultural pressures arrayed against him. Nevertheless, he did not modify his position that in confrontations between scripture and natural observation, allegory was legitimate only for biblical interpretation.

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The allegory of the theologians, as already noted, is not the only context for Galileo’s engagement with the trope. The second sphere of allegory touched on by Galileo is the poetic-aesthetic, which he sees as involving a misguided approach that undermines the classical formalism of direct narrative and thereby explodes and obstructs the concepts it expresses, rendering them monstrous. In a classic interpretive text, Erwin Panofsky explored Galileo’s express distaste for poetic and artistic allegory by examining Galileo’s polemical contraposition of Tasso’s metaphorics with the formal purity of Ariosto in Considerazioni al Tasso.23 As Panofsky points out, in Considerazioni Galileo decries the manner in which Tasso’s allegorical poetry unleashes meaning from rule-governed, deliberate linguistic construction such that it requires, as Galileo puts it, “the patching together of broken concepts that have no dependence or connection between them.”24 The reader is forced, in Panofsky’s words, “to interpret everything as a recondite reference to something else,” and indeed, Panofsky argues, Galileo’s precise objection is that allegorical poetry is analogous to the distortion required for pictorial anamorphosis. Thus, in the poetic-aesthetic context, Galileo holds that allegory involves the exercise of illegitimate representational constraint by which “the current tale, openly and originally directly grasped, must accommodate itself to an allegorical meaning, obliquely seen and merely implied, which extravagantly obstructs the tale with chimerical, fantastic, and superfluous imaginings.”25 Galileo sees such a form of allegorization, of course, as anathema to the practice of natural philosophy. Closely linked to his critique of poetic-aesthetic allegory and connecting it with the misuse of theological allegory is the critique of the category I identify as textual allegory. In a 1610 letter to Kepler, Galileo attacks allegorical misreaders who engage in a distortion of philosophical practice by mistaking philosophy for literature. He decries those who proceed as if “philosophy is a kind of book like the Aeneid or the Odyssey, and who seek truth not in the world or in nature, but in confrontation with texts.”26 This thematic is extended when, responding polemically in Il Saggiatore to the scholastic Oratio Grassi (with whom he had traded barbs over the Tychonian versus Copernican models), Galileo insists that philosophy is not “a book of fantasy by some writer, like the Iliad or Orlando furioso, productions in which the least important thing is whether what is written is true.”27 Galileo’s attack on poetic-aesthetic allegory focused on Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata while praising Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, and the 1610 letter to Kepler initiates the attack on textual allegory by denouncing “tex-

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tual confrontation” through explicit citation of the Aeneid and the Odyssey. On the other hand, in Il Saggiatore Galileo opposes natural philosophical and mathematical investigations to even those works of literature that survive his critique of poetic-aesthetic allegory. In the full critique of textual allegory, the classicist Ariosto is condemned along with the allegorically mannerist Tasso, and the supposedly historical Iliad is eschewed along with the fabulous and traditionally allegorically interpretable Odyssey and Aeneid. Thus the key to the problem Galileo identifies with textual allegory and what differentiates it from his critique of poetic-aesthetic allegory is not its reliance on fantasy per se but its faith in practices of legitimation that define truth through adherence to textual authorization. This form of allegory mobilizes a muddled interpretive framework that exchanges textual engagement with the philosophical contemplation of nature and thereby substitutes fiction for truth. To frame philosophy in confrontatione textuum, in other words, is to reduce truth to literary fantasy. With regard to poetic-aesthetic allegory, both Panofsky and Dante Della Terza have suggested that Galileo’s relationship to this form of rhetoric may be more complicated than it first appears. Panofsky points to the traces of Galileo’s platonic commitment to the perfection of the circular movement of celestial bodies and his resistance to the more modern ellipses proposed by the (ironically) hermetic Kepler.28 Complementing this observation, Della Terza proposes a distinction between the content of Galileo’s po­lemic against Tasso’s poetics and the intense stylistic residue the engagement with Gerusalemme Liberata leaves in Galileo’s own rhetorical practices.29 Galileo’s enthusiasm for a specifically diagrammatic allegorical exercise in his 1588 lectures on the architecture of hell in Dante’s Inferno could be added to this list of instances rendering problematic his condemnation of poetic-aesthetic allegory.30 With regard to allegorical language involving a confrontation with texts and relying on the fallacy of authority, Galileo, as is well known, does frame the philosophical investigation of the cosmos as a series of confrontatione textuum in the most celebrated passage from Il Saggiatore where philosophy is figured as the careful practice of reading the grand book of the universe written in the language of mathematics.31 While the famous lines regarding the book of the universe are sometimes too quickly assumed to oppose it directly to the scriptural language of the “divine book,” it is clear (as I showed earlier) that Galileo primarily has in mind what he sees as the illegitimate practice of authorial legitimation through confrontation with texts.

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What all three misuses of allegory share is a commitment to a hermeneutic of authorization through a confrontation with texts that insists that philosophical claims be indexed to an external allegorical framework, whether via a priority attributed to sacralized language (theological allegory), the chimerical obfuscation of oblique metaphor (poetic-aesthetic allegory), or the literary practice of legitimation by auctores favored by the scholastic Aristotelians (textual allegory). So what is it about the allegorical practice of reading the grand book of the universe that exempts it from Galileo’s overarching critique of textual allegory as literary fantasy and poeticaesthetic allegory as conceptual obfuscation? Galileo’s overarching critique of allegorical discourse is that it demands the arbitrary imposition of unnatural conceptual and tropological correspondences that obstruct “the current narrative” of immediate data gleaned from experience and the observation of nature. Nevertheless, Galilean allegory proper will dispense with the chimerical and fantastic in favor of a different kind of connection between allegorical figuration and its meaning. Where the object of his critique is reliance on authorial legitimation, reading the book of nature allegorically will no longer mean imposing structures of similitude on experiential phenomena to interpret them according to a series of given textual categories and figures. Instead, this most unnatural of tropes will be naturalized, as the data of experience and its mathematical organization by reason constitute the well-ordered series of figures to which any meaningful discourse must correspond. The book of nature, in other words, will be the allegorical touchstone for Galileo’s own Dialogo, and the task of the latter will be to bring its readers into conformity with the former. Galilean allegory proper (as opposed to the three forms of allegory he condemns) is thus not governed by acts of reading legitimized with reference to authority but by the allegorization of the activity of philosophical reading as such, realized through staging the materialization of natural philosophical contemplation in the dramatized inscription of Galileo’s diagram within the pages of the Dialogo itself. Reading Copernicus’s De revolutionibus, we are presented with a static diagram whose structure corresponds to a set of claims about the celestial movements and their spatial relationships as described in the text. In Galileo’s Dialogo, we are invited, along with Simplicio and Sagredo, to find our own ink and compass and to engage in the production of a parallel diagram, perhaps in the very margins of the book beside its printed instantiation, transforming the pages of our own copies into the enormous expanse

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of the universe.32 Wearing the mask of Copernicus, Salviati mobilizes the reproduction and transformation of Copernicus’s diagram, narrating the process of its inscription onto the pages of the text in which he is written and implicitly demanding that Galileo’s readers produce it yet again. By mobilizing an immobile diagram of the movement of the planets around the sun, the Dialogo ensures that not only the claims of the Copernican thesis will be propagated but that the image of that system and the anamnetic process by which its readers both grasp and produce the Copernican structure of the universe will function as an interpretive key to unlock the emblematic codes of its cosmology.

t h e m a r k of t h e c om pa s s As Arielle Saiber has pointed out, Bruno’s Cena hyperbolically insists on the identity of reading and diagrammatic visualization from the start, as Bruno instructs his readers in the prefatory epistle “you are to read and visualize [leggete e vedrete] what I have to say.”33 Unlike Galileo’s scene of diagrammatic construction, Bruno’s is neither pedagogical nor anamnetic but polemical. It stands, nevertheless, as equally self-referential, performative, and allegorical, though in a thoroughly puzzling way. Like Galileo’s text, Cena is cast in dialogical form. Teofilo (who, like Salviati, wears the mask of Copernicus) narrates another conversational drama, recounting to Smitho (a hilariously generic Englishman) the travails of a character named the Nolan at an Ash Wednesday banquet in London where he debates a pair of Oxford dons (“Il Nolano,” of course, is an author-metonym for Bruno of Nola). In the fourth dialogue, the Nolan demolishes various objections to the Copernican hypothesis raised by an Oxford pedant, Doctor Torquato, and presents elements of his own differences from Copernicus (his commitments to the infinity of the universe, the similarity of the stars to our Earth, their “ensouled” nature, and so on). The infuriated Torquato subsequently calls for paper and an inkpot, insisting that he will teach the Nolan the right way to understand Ptolemy and Copernicus. The diagram he produces (its inscription is described step by step in the text, as with Galileo) is a double one, displaying in one and the same figure the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems, the former above the centerline and the latter below it. When Torquato finishes, the Nolan peers at the diagram and scornfully says, “This man wanted to teach me as Copernican doctrine a thing

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Copernicus ­himself did not intend; and he would have preferred having his throat slit rather than to say or write it.”34 The problem with Torquato’s diagram, the Nolan sarcastically explains, is that it places the mark meant to stand for Earth in the center of the epicycle on the circumference of the third sphere, rather than on the circumference of the epicycle of the moon.35 Torquato will not admit that he has made a mistake, so the other guests at the banquet call for a copy of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus to be brought in.36 As they examine the page with Copernicus’s diagram, Teofilo relates, “The Nolan burst into laughter and told them that the point [which Torquato thought was Earth] was only the mark of a compass left when drawing the epicycle of the earth and the Moon, which is one and the same.”37 He admonishes, “If you really want to know where Earth is according to Copernicus’ theory, read his own words.”38 They read the text before them and find that the Nolan is correct, at which point Torquato leaves the banquet in disgrace. There are a number of elements in this scene that render Bruno’s text deeply fascinating and problematic, the least of which is that the actual diagram printed in Cena in 1584 is not exactly the diagram constructed by the characters in the dialogue (Figure 3.2). Aside from lacking various labels and signs that Teofilo describes Torquato as adding, more importantly, it substitutes the Nolan’s “correction” for Torquato’s “error”: Earth and the moon are depicted as circling one another on an epicycle whose center is located on the third celestial sphere (this can be seen in the complex of figures inscribed below the centerline). Far stranger are the conditions of the Nolan’s triumph over Torquato and the subsequent emendation of the printed diagram: Torquato is right and the Nolan is wrong! If, as the dialogue invites us to do, we were to fetch our own copy of De revolutionibus, we would find that Copernicus does place Earth on the circumference of a celestial sphere and sets the moon in an epicycle around it, just as Torquato claims.39 The point described by the Nolan as the mark of Copernicus’s compass is just what we know it to be today: Earth orbiting the sun, with the moon orbiting it in turn. Neither the language of Copernicus’s text nor the diagram printed with it (Figure 3.1) matches the Nolan’s triumphant description and the diagram printed in Cena. Astonishingly, on the autograph manuscript page of De revolutionibus containing the earliest extant version of the diagram in question (a page Bruno certainly never saw) something that may be the physical mark left by Copernicus’ compass is clearly visible, though only in the location of the sun at the center of the whole apparatus of the

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celestial spheres.40 It is as if the Nolan’s error has been answered not only by the reader who accepts his invitation to carefully consult a copy of De revolutionibus, but avant la lettre by the conjunction of Copernicus’s page and the mechanical tool of its inscription. Things become even odder when we remember that the whole banquet described by Teofilo in Cena is a revenge drama written by Bruno in response to his humiliating treatment at Oxford in 1583 (the year before the publication of his book). While details of the historical event remain murky, in the pages of Cena Frula (a companion of Teofilo) relates that during the public disputation with the Oxford doctors of theology, the Nolan “answered their arguments and . . . fifteen times, for fifteen syllogisms, the poor doctor whom they put before the Nolan on this grave occasion . . . felt like a fish out of water.”41 In response, Frula relates, the resentful dons cravenly cancelled Bruno’s public lectures on the immortality of the soul and its cosmological consequences. As one historian of the actual event has discovered, the real reception of the Oxford dons to Bruno’s lectures was just as dripping with vitriol as Bruno’s own prose. Robert McNulty cites an account by George Abbot, Master of University College, who scornfully described Bruno as that Italian Didapper who . . . stripping up his sleeves like some juggler, and telling us much of chentrum and chirculus and churcumferenchia . . . undertook among very many other matters to set on foot the opinion of Copernicus that the earth did go round, and the heavens did stand still, whereas in truth it was his own head which rather did run round and his brains did not stand still.42

Abbot further recounts discovering that Bruno’s lectures were lifted verbatim from Ficino’s De vita coelitus comparanda and having the rest of them cancelled for this plagiarism. The strange thing here is that it is all but impossible to imagine how a verbatim recitation or even a rough paraphrase of Ficino’s text could be used to defend the Copernican hypothesis because the work in question is devoted to a description of the astrological powers of the planets and their images in no way arranged according to the Copernican system. On the other hand, De vita does contain discussions of the astrological powers Ficino attributes to the images of the stars and planets, even including a chapter entitled “How to Construct a Figure of the Universe.”43 With Bruno we first have an initial historical event in which a defense of Copernicus is undercut by charges of plagiarism that were probably false.

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Second, we have a narrative recasting of this event in a conversation between Teofilo and Smitho that stands as the allegorical framework in which Bruno defends the Copernican hypothesis and develops a theory of the relationship between metaphorical figures and the discourse of truth (something I will discuss shortly). Third, we have the allegorical redramatization of the historical event in the metaphor-laden Ash Wednesday banquet described by Teofilo, where the Nolan, if only in the pages of Cena, triumphantly vanquishes the Oxford dons by demonstrating that they have only been glancing at the diagrams of Copernicus’s book and not seriously reading its text. Finally, we have the odd fact that the Nolan provides neither a true account of the Copernican thesis nor an accurate reproduction of its diagram but instead constructs an argument based on little more than a glance at the images in Copernicus’s book, one whose precision is nevertheless confirmed (within the dialogue) through a dramatized consultation with a copy of De revolutionibus itself. Does it make sense to say that this diagram and the argument surrounding it function allegorically? This is certainly the tack taken by most commentators on Cena, who have tended (under the influence of Francis Yates) to emphasize the ineluctably hermetic nature of Bruno’s philosophical thought, insisting, as do Edward Gosselin and Lawrence Lerner, that the diagram is “a grand metaphor or hieroglyphic for his insights into the fundamental nature of the universe” and “an iconographic device to lead the reader towards deeper insight.”44 It is certainly true that Cena is shot through with references to the hermetic tradition (as is De revolutionibus) as well as explicit attempts to differentiate the position of the Nolan from that of Copernicus. But insofar as questions about how to read Bruno’s diagram circle around the dichotomy of a hermetic, prophetic Copernicanism versus a natural philosophical one, I think they remain uninteresting. It is more productive, I propose, to ask how this particular tropological assemblage of the visual, the literary, and the philosophical—Copernicus’s diagram and its reconstruction, propagation, and in Bruno, its deformation—functions allegorically.45 We can then approach Bruno and Galileo as allegorical readers (and misreaders) not of Copernicus the astronomer, but of Copernicus’s book De revolutionibus and its diagram. In this vein, I propose that the hermetic interpreters of Bruno are right to take his diagram to be an allegorical hieroglyph but that rather than simply assuming this means excusing its inaccuracy with a gesture toward hermetic mysteries, it makes more sense

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to investigate the status and function of the hieroglyphic and the allegorical in the pages of Cena. Immediately preceding the construction of the diagram, Teofilo and Smitho engage in an important discussion of metaphor and allegorical language. Smitho raises the standard theological objection to the Copernican thesis: Its propositions contradict scripture. Teofilo responds by drawing a distinction between two types of texts, those that deal with “demonstrations and speculations about natural matters, as if with philosophy” and those that “direct the practice of moral actions through laws.”46 Because scripture belongs to the latter category, all of its claims bearing on natural philosophy are, Teofilo argues, quite simply irrelevant. Just as Galileo will later reject scriptural authority in favor of reading the grand book of the universe, Teofilo holds that justifications by way of biblical reference have no place within natural philosophical discourse. In a move quite different from Galileo’s critique of theological allegory, however, Bruno’s Teofilo proposes that it is precisely their amenability to allegorical interpretation that makes sacred texts unsuited to ground claims about the natural world because they admit of an infinite range of interpretations and are structured by unstable metaphors.47 The allegorical interpretation of sacred texts is a mistake from the start, he argues, despite the sense in which they seem to demand it. Because their aim is the direction of moral action, sacred words should be interpreted, as Smitho puts it, “according to the common understanding.”48 When it comes to passages in these texts that appear to make claims regarding natural things we ought not resort to allegorical interpretation, he exhorts, but simply remember that their objects have nothing at all to do with the truths of the natural world. In fact, it is the allegorical interpretation of sacred (and thus moral rather than philosophical) texts that leads contemplation awry, such that “parrots of Aristotle, Plato, and Averröes, by means of whose philosophy they have promoted themselves to theologians, say that all these statements [in scripture] have a metaphorical meaning so that by virtue of their metaphors they extract any meaning they please, through jealous preference for the philosophy on which they were raised.”49 We might have expected Bruno to make a more familiar move by aligning allegorical interpretation with religious texts and literal reading with philosophy, a strategy (like Galileo’s) traceable to Augustine. He would thereby easily sidestep Smitho’s objection because biblical passages that deny Earth’s movement could be allegorically recoded to support (or at least

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not to conflict with) the theses of Copernicus and the Nolan. But Bruno is doing just the opposite when Teofilo establishes his “distinction between truth and metaphor,” claiming, “We should not take as metaphor what has not been said metaphorically or on the contrary to take to be true what has been said as a simile.”50 The first element of his position is that allegorical readings of sacred texts undermine the distinction between metaphor and truth, and so such texts ought to be read literally. The second is that they must be rigorously confined to their proper sphere—the laws of practical morality—and kept at arm’s length from explications of truths of the natural world. If, within this dyad of sacred moral discourse and profane philosophical truth, allegorical reading has been delegitimated as an interpretive practice for moral discourse, it is only with the language of philosophical contemplation—where the common meaning of words has been left behind and “special understanding” is present—it is only here, within the discourse of truth, that one can legitimately wield metaphor and allegory.51 Where in his explicit critique of theological allegory Galileo would deny that allegorical language has any role within philosophical discourse and insist that it be restricted to the theological sphere, in Bruno’s Cena allegory is denied entirely to theology and restricted to philosophy. However irreconcilable this move is with Galileo’s, each is meant to accomplish the same goal: to avoid the reduction of philosophical claims to mediated articulations of religious dogma. The difference is that rather than delimit philosophical language within the space of literality, Bruno’s text frames it as the only legitimate field in which allegory can function without distortion. Where for Galileo the philosophical language of truth would require the careful circumscription of its claims to guard against theological prejudice, poetic-aesthetic chimeras, and textual practices of authorization, for Bruno the truth-function of philosophical discourse is the condition for the legitimation of allegory as such. This is not to say that allegorical interpretation and the language of truth collapse entirely in Cena. Rather, it is only within the precisely delimited sphere of philosophical contemplation that one can rigorously distinguish between them and thus use the languages of both truth and allegory legitimately. Bruno’s precise critique of the platonic, Aristotelian, and Averröist “parrots” is not that they use allegory as such but that they destabilize its metaphors by drawing them from sacred rather than philosophical texts. The only stable allegories in the position Bruno develops are constructed within the sphere of the philosophical contemplation of nature.

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t h e on tol o g y of t h e pag e Without, I hope, engaging in my own version of the fallacy of appeal to authority that Galileo denounced in his critique of textual allegory, I will conclude by demonstrating that the complex relationships between philosophical and allegorical language framed by the Dialogo and Cena can be productively understood within the broader framework of the epistemological and rhetorical transitions that mark the end of the Renaissance, as described theoretically by Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault. I argued above that Galileo’s critical stances toward theological, poetic-aesthetic, and textual allegory shared a single ground: the refusal to allow philosophical contemplation to be governed by a hermeneutic structure of authorization that would bind it to an allegorical framework outside of and prior to sen­sory observation and natural reason. The scene of diagrammatic construction in the Dialogo, I proposed, does not abandon allegory as such in the face of this resistance. Instead, Galileo’s text restructures it first, as the naturalized allegory of the experiential and mathematical script in which the book of the universe can be read, and second, as the allegorical naturalization of the activity of such philosophical reading itself as the readers of the Dialogo are wrenched into the material process of the text’s diagrammatic construction. A rhetorically and philosophically significant result is that the allegorization at work in Galileo’s discourse no longer involves the assumption that there are natural structures of resemblance linking allegorical figures to allegorized meanings. Despite his reversal of Galileo’s critical locus for allegory vis-à-vis philosophical and theological language, Bruno’s concern with the instability of allegorical discourse—or at least Teofilo’s concern within the pages of Cena—turns on a similar displacement. In Bruno’s text, the problem with allegorical language when mobilized outside the sphere of philosophical contemplation is that it is infinitely interpretable, exploding into a multiplicity of possible meanings. Every scriptural, poetic-aesthetic, or textual allegorical figure can be framed so as to resemble any other, and thus allegorical language immediately spins out of control. This use of allegory reduces claims to explicate natural laws and structures to polemical weapons wielded in the service of dogmatic and arbitrary images of the real, such as that which insists that Earth does not move and the universe is finite. For Bruno, allegory can be mobilized coherently only within the discursive sphere of philosophical truth, based on the experiential observation

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of nature and rational demonstration. As in Galileo’s text, the dramatization of the construction of a cosmological diagram materializes the process of natural philosophical contemplation as an act of philosophical reading, with the difference that the copy of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus that enters Bruno’s stage does not, in fact, resemble the diagram his text claims to reproduce. Much later, Benjamin, too, was interested in the baroque tensions between the endless interpretability of allegorical figures and their necessary stabilization (though with an emphasis on the historical entirely lacking in Galileo and Bruno). On one side of Benjamin’s “antinomies of the allegorical,” “Any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else” rendering allegorical language ineluctably secular and conventional.52 On the other hand, the fragmentary images arranged by allegorical signification derive thereby an expressive power “which makes them appear no longer commensurable with profane things” and transforms them into sacred language.53 One result of this antinomy is the mutation of the language of sacred texts and their images into complex hieroglyphs that guarantee the stable signification of allegorical script. For Benjamin, the German baroque Trauerspiel theater is a unique (or more precisely, “extreme”) manifestation of these antinomies insofar as what it presents is the failure of the hieroglyphic character pushed to its limit. The object of its hieroglyphic sacralization is the decay and finitude of profane and secular history, figured nevertheless as an eternal dialectic of the transience and death that belong to the sphere of becoming.54 With the explosion of allegorical figuration, the rise of the sense that its images are expressions of convention, and the concomitant vision of secular history as sacralized and eternal finitude— that is, at the extreme limits where its coherency disintegrates—the very idea of baroque allegory begins, for Benjamin, to become legible. Foucault analyzed a similar transitional phenomenon when he described the move beyond a Renaissance episteme dominated by systems of natural similitude and resemblance and obsessed with deciphering the signatures of the world as a form of sacred hieroglyphics.55 Bruno, of course, is still committed to the hermetic system of natural magic that expresses itself in terms of sympathy and antipathy, analogy, emulation, and symmetry. Unlike the central texts in Foucault’s archaeology of late Renaissance similitude (works by Paracelsus, Oswald Croll, and Giovani Della Porta figure most prominently), Bruno’s Cena insists on stabilizing signatures and limiting the legitimate mobilization of the structures of resemblance that make al-

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legory possible. In this we can see the kernel of the critique of resemblance that undergirds—again on Foucault’s reading—the shift to the episteme of representation in the seventeenth century. For Bacon, Descartes, Arnauld, and others, the resemblance that was to guarantee the validity of allegorical discourse delegitimates itself in the moment of its triumph as the hypostatization of similitude. Where every object, phrase, figure, and trope resembles every other, similitude itself becomes the danger against which philosophical thinking must guard. Where every figure is both the potential subject and object of allegorization with respect to every other, the very resemblance that renders allegorization possible must be carefully circumscribed within the domain of error. Here “Language is no longer one of the figurations of the world, or a signature stamped upon things from the beginning of time,” Foucault writes. “It is the task of words to translate truth if they can; but they no longer have the right to be considered the mark of it.”56 Foucault’s description of this epistemic shift has been challenged, of course, both with regard to the completeness of his account of the Renaissance episteme (it relies too heavily on texts that function as remnants of late neoplatonism while ignoring late Aristotelian positions) and the decisiveness of the turn away from similitude in early modernity (the category continues to function productively for many philosophers of the seventeenth century).57 Nevertheless, neither of these forms of critique effectively touches on Foucault’s claims regarding the nature of a general shift away from similitude itself, even if they demonstrate that it is not as complete as Foucault proposes. Bruno and Galileo make somewhat different moves, the essence of which are nevertheless captured by Benjamin and Foucault. As in the accounts of baroque language by this pair of twentieth-century philosophers, the work of these early moderns clearly acknowledges the difficulty inherent in the allegorical mobilization of an infinitely metaphorical discourse. In attempts to reconcile the language of truth regarding the nature of the world with given and established figures of sacred script, they discern allegory dismantling its own power to evoke and communicate truth. The Galilean alternative is that allegory used correctly does not obscure the relation of similitude between figure and concept because it dispenses with that relation altogether by collapsing the practice of philosophical reading into the activity of philosophical inscription. When Salviati takes up the Copernican mask, the Dialogo does not assume a series of given authorial figures of reference to which truth claims about the natural world must correspond.

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Instead it leaves behind the logic of authorization altogether by weaving its readers into the fabric of its textual construction. For Bruno, only within the bounds of a secularized discourse of philosophical contemplation can allegory be stabilized and put to work in the explication of nature. Rather than turn its back on the allegorical possibilities of language in the name of establishing a firm and lasting foundation for the sciences, Nolan discourse instead inscribes them on the surface of the pages of the Copernican book of the world. In Cena, allegory finds its proper and stabilized home within the domain of philosophical truth. Does this mean, finally, that we can rescue the errors of Bruno’s cosmological diagram by rendering them allegorical? It certainly does not. If anything, these errors present a moment of the failure of the allegorical to accomplish its own legitimation within the limits of philosophy. It does mean that when we read the Cena diagram in its becoming, locating its pre- and posthistory in the texts of Copernicus and Galileo, we find in Bruno’s text a ground for understanding the place of allegory within baroque natural philosophical discourse. Notes 1.  EN XI, 341. The following abbreviations are used throughout the essay: EN: Galileo Galilei, Le opere di Galileo Galilei, ed. Antonio Favaro, nuovo ristampa della Edizione Nazionale, 20 vol. (Florence: G. Barbèra, 1968). D: Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, trans. Stillman Drake (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). C: Nicholas Copernicus, Opera omnia, ed. Polish Academy of Sciences, 2 vols. (Warsaw: Officina Publica Libris Scientificis Edendis, 1973–1975). R: Nicholas Copernicus, On the Revolutions, ed. Jerzy Dobrzycki, trans. Edward Rosen, vol. 2 of Complete Works, ed. Polish Academy of Sciences (London: Macmillan, 1973). B: Giordano Bruno, Le Souper des Cendres [La Cena de le Ceneri], ed. Giovanni Aquilecchia, trans. Yves Hersant, vol. 2 of Oeuvres complètes [critical edition of the original Italian text with French translation] (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1994). A: Giordano Bruno, The Ash Wednesday Supper, ed. and trans. Edward A. Gosselin and Lawrence S. Lerner (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995). 2.  EN VII, 29; D, 5. 3.  EN VII, 157–158; D, 131.

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4.  C II, 5; R, 5. 5.  This essay is not as directly concerned with establishing the lines of historical influence among these texts as it is with investigating the genealogical and textual traces of what I am proposing is an allegorical genre of the cosmological diagram. For more direct examinations of the philosophical-historical influence of Bruno’s dialogue on Galileo’s, see Giovanni Aquilecchia, “Possible Brunian Echoes in Galileo,” Nouvelles de la République des Lettres 1 (1995): 11–18, and Hilary Gatti, “Giordano Bruno’s ‘Ash Wednesday Supper’ and Galileo’s ‘Dialogue of the Two Major World Systems,’” Bruniana e Campanelliana 3.2 (1997): 283–300. 6.  While it is extremely unlikely that Copernicus actually carved the woodcut used for printing the diagram in 1543, the image is based on the hand- and compass-drawn diagram in his autograph manuscript. The autograph manuscript (located in the Jagiellonian Library in Krakow) is reproduced in several facsimile editions, including C I, 9v. 7.  In philosophical discourse, interrogation of diagrammatic reasoning has tended to focus on (a) the function of diagrams as visual modes of logical representation in relation to symbolic and linguistic systems or (b) the possible role of diagrammatic thinking in internal cognitive representation. The most notable work for the former approach is Sun-Joo Shin, The Logical Status of Diagrams (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994). For the latter, see Michael Tye, The Imagery Debate (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991) and the essays collected in Imagery, ed. Ned Joel Block (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981). Thus, the bulk of philosophical interest in diagrams has been restricted to central topics in the disciplinary node involving philosophy of mind, logic, cognitive science, and information theory. The work of Mark Greeves is a notable exception, in that while continuing to focus on the role of diagrams in logical representation he also insists on framing those functions with respect to the history of philosophical mathematics (Mark Greeves, The Philosophical Status of Diagrams. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, 2002). Recently, John Mullarkey has begun to map the terrain in which a form of “diagrammatology” may be articulated at the post- or anti-Derridean end of the late twentieth century French philosophical tradition, particularly with respect to the work of Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, Michael Henry, and François Laruelle (with a more marginal engagement with Bruno Latour). See especially Mullarkey’s promissory chapter “Thinking in Diagrams” in his Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (London: Continuum, 2006), 157–186. Forthcoming work by literary historian John Bender and art historian Michael Marrinan is likely to open the field of debate more broadly by considering diagrammatic reasoning in relation to cultural history and the theoretical discourses of a broader swath of humanistic disciples. 8.  Brian Rotman, “Thinking Dia-Grams: Mathematics, Writing, and Virtual Reality,” South-Atlantic-Quarterly, 94.2 (Spring 1995): 401. 9.  Reviel Netz, The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 26, 31, 32, and 37.

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10.  Ibid., 12. 11.  While thus entirely sympathetic with the constellation of theoretical problems and objects Walter Ong arranges in “From Allegory to Diagram in the Renaissance Mind: A Study in the Significance of the Allegorical Tableau,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Criticism 17.4 (1959): 423–440, my approach is quite different. For a powerful essay exploring the strategies by which Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius stages the moment of its reception as a text and uses its illustrative practices to frame cosmological structures as its visual analogues, see Elizabeth Spiller, “Reading through Galileo’s Telescope: Margaret Cavendish and the Experience of Reading,” Renaissance Quarterly 53.1 (Spring 2000): 192–221. On the relationship between Galileo’s work and artistic rather than textual forms of depiction, see Eileen Reeves, Painting the Heavens: Art and Science in the Age of Galileo (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). For an overview of the most important work on Galileo’s use of and engagement with images, see Horst Bredekamp, “Gazing Hands and Blind Spots: Galileo as Draftsman,” in Galileo in Context, ed. Jürgen Renn (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 153–187 and—more extensively—Bredekamp’s recent Galilei der Künstler: Die Zeichnung, der Mond, die Sonne (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2007). A forthcoming book by Bredekamp and a group of art historians, art conservators, and conservation scientists focuses on the images associated with the Sidereus Nuncius and may contribute to reconfiguring the terms of this debate. 12.  My thanks to Harry Berger for suggesting this phrase. 13.  EN VII, 350; D, 322–323. 14.  As Owen Gingerich discovered in the course of his exhaustive survey of the extant copies of De revolutionibus, Galileo owned a copy of the 1566 second edition, specifically one that is now at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence. Gingerich reports that while in his copy Galileo carried out the textual censorship required by the 1616/1620 Decree of the Holy Congregation, the passages in question are only lightly crossed out and still clearly legible (Owen Gingerich, An Annotated Census of Copernicus’ ‘De Revolutionibus.’ Leiden: Brill, 2002, 122). 15.  Plato, Meno, 82a–85e in Laches, Protagoras, Meno, Euthydemus, trans. W. R. M. Lamb, Loeb Classical Library 165 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 304–321. 16.  On Kepler as a rhetorician, see Fernand Hallyn, La Structure poétique du monde: Copernic, Kepler (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1987), and specifically as an allegorist, see James Paxson, “Kepler’s Allegory of Containment, the Making of Modern Astronomy, and the Semiotics of Mathematical Thought,” Intertexts 3.2 (Fall 1999): 105–125. 17.  Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 187–228. 18.  Galileo to Dini (March 23, 1615), EN V, 299–300. 19.  For a direct account of Galileo’s indebtedness to Augustine on this issue, see Eileen Reeves, “Augustine and Galileo on Reading the Heavens,” Journal of the

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History of Ideas 52.4 (Oct.–Dec., 1991): 563–579. For a more general account of the intertwining of rhetorical and scientific discourse in Galileo’s work, see Jean Dietz Moss, Novelties in the Heavens: Rhetoric and Science in the Copernican Controversy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 20.  Lettera a Madama Cristina di Lorena Granduchessa di Toscana, EN V, 316; Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo, trans. Stillman Drake (New York: Random House, 1957), 182. 21.  EN V, 316; Discoveries and Opinions, 182. Cf. Galileo to Castelli (December 21, 1613), EN V, 282. 22.  Reeves, “Augustine and Galileo,” 571–572. See also Ernan McMullin, “Galileo on Science and Scripture,” in The Cambridge Companion to Galileo, ed. Peter Machamer (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 271–347. 23.  Erwin Panofsky, Galileo as a Critic of the Arts (The Hague: Martinus Nij­ hoff, 1954). Galileo’s Considerazioni al Tasso can be found at EN IX, 59–148. 24.  EN IX, 63. Galileo writes, “rappezando insieme concetti spezati e senza dependenza e connessione tra loro.” See also Postille all’Ariosto, EN IX, 149–194 (Panofsky, Galileo as a Critic, 13). Panofsky also argues that Galileo’s general aesthetic stance involves a conscious rejection of Mannerist painting. For a reassessment of Panofsky’s position in light of later research on the nature and origin of Galileo’s images, see Bredekamp, “Gazing Hands and Blind Spots,” 184–187. On Panofsky’s account of the exemplarity of Ariosto and Tasso, see Reeves, Painting the Heavens, 18–22. 25.  EN IX, 130. 26.  Galileo to Kepler (August 19, 1610), EN X, 423. 27.  EN VI, 232; The Assayer in The Controversy of the Comets of 1618: Galileo, Grassi, Guiducci, Kepler, trans. Stillman Drake and C. D. O’Malley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960), 183, translation modified. 28.  Panofsky, Galileo as Critic, 20–31. 29.  Dante Della Terza, “Galileo, Man of Letters,” in Galileo Reappraised, ed. Carlo L. Golino (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 6–7. See also Mario Biagioli, “Galileo the Emblem Maker,” Isis 83.2 (June 1992): 195–217. 30.  Due lezioni all’Accademia Fiorentina circa la figura, sito e grandezza dell’ Inferno di Dante, EN IX, 29–58. 31.  “Philosophy is written in this grand book—I mean the universe—which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth.” EN VI, 232; Controversy of the Comets, 183–184. 32.  Gingerich notes that while Galileo made no technical annotations in his copy of De revolutionibus, a later reader of the same copy performed exactly the type of marginal reproduction of Copernicus’ diagrams I am arguing Galileo’s own text demands (Gingerich, Annotated Census, 122).

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33.  B, 13; A, 69. Arielle Saiber, Giordano Bruno and the Geometry of Language (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 119. Saiber deals with diagrams in other texts by Bruno in Bruno and Geometry, 48–60, as well as in “Ornamental Flourishes in Giordano Bruno’s Geometry,” Sixteenth Century Journal 34.3 (2003): 729–745. Other work on Bruno’s diagrams includes Mino Gabriele, Giordano Bruno: Corpus iconographicum: Le incisioni nelle opere a stampa (Milan: Adelphi, 2001), and Cristoph Lüthy, “Bruno’s Area Democriti and the Origins of Atomist Imagery,” Bruniana e Campanelliana 4 (1998): 59–92, though neither provide a sustained treatment of the diagrams in Cena. 34.  B, 227; A, 192. 35.  What Bruno refers to as “the third sphere” is the fully visible semicircle third from the sun in the lower “Copernican” half of his diagram (Figure 3.2). The two central semicircles of the upper “Ptolemaic” half are eliminated in the textual description of the lower half of the diagram, even while one of them remains visible beneath the flames of the sun in the woodblock print. In Copernicus’s diagram, the corresponding sphere is labeled “V. Telluris cum orbe Lunari annum revolutio” but is referred to in the text as “the series’s fourth place” [quartum in ordine], i.e. the fourth place in the series of mobile planetary spheres contained within the ­immobile sphere of the fixed stars (Figure 3.1; C II, 20; R, 21). In Galileo’s diagram, the same sphere is labeled “A” with the Moon’s epicycle marked as “NP” (Figure 3.3). 36.  Presumably, Bruno has in mind his own copy of De revolutionibus, a second edition like that possessed by Galileo. Gingerich reports that Bruno owned the copy now in the collection of the Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome, named for the head of the Inquisition that ordered Bruno to be burned at the stake (Gingerich, Annotated Census, 115). This copy contains no annotations by Bruno, and while he reproduces Bruno’s “bold signature,” Gingerich elsewhere significantly claims that there is “no evidence that he actually read the book” (Owen Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus. New York, Walker & Co., 2004, 64–65). 37.  B, 227–229; A, 192. For a brief account of the history of Bruno’s clearly metaphysical fascination with the compass, see Saiber, Bruno and Geometry, 136. 38.  B, 229; A, 192. 39.  Copernicus’s statement is “The annual revolution . . . contains the earth, as I said, together with the lunar sphere as an epicycle” (C II, 20; R, 21). For an overview of Bruno’s misreading and the various proposed interpretations of its origin, see Ernan McMullin, “Bruno and Copernicus,” Isis 78.1 (March 1987): 55–74. 40.  C I, 9v. In the critical notes to his translation of De revolutionibus, Rosen explicitly identifies the apparent circle at the center of the manuscript diagram as “the mark left unintentionally by the fixed, blunt foot of the compass with which Copernicus drew the circles in this diagram” (R, 359n20). The status of this mark remains a question, however, since a full examination of the various available facsimiles of the autograph present highly contradictory evidence with respect to it.

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In collaboration with paper conservator Theresa Smith, I am currently engaged in a project examining the implications of these contradictions. 41.  He felt like a “pulcino entro la stoppa,” more literally “a chick on a leash” (B, 215; A, 186–187). 42.  George Abbot, The Reasons Which Doctor Hill Hath Brought Forth for the Upholding of Papistry (Oxford, 1604), fols. 4v–5r, cited in Robert McNulty, ­“Bruno at Oxford,” Isis 13.4 (Winter 1960): 302–303, with the typography and spelling modernized here. See also Ernan McMullin, “Giordano Bruno at Oxford,” Isis 77.1 (March 1986): 85–94, as well as Hilary Gatti, Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 43–46. 43.  Marsilio Ficino, “De fabricanda universi figura,” De Vita Coelitus comparanda, De Vita libri tres . . . , vol. 1 of Opera Omnia (Torino: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1962), 519–572. 44.  Gosselin and Lerner, Introduction to A, 27–28 and 198n56. The critical introduction to their translation of Cena remains a touchstone for many contemporary Anglo-American readings of the work. This interpretation of Bruno as a hermetic mystic rather than a natural philosopher committed to a form of revised Copernicanism can be traced back to Francis Yates, “Giordano Bruno’s Conflict with Oxford,” Journal of the Warburg Institute 2 (1938–1939): 227–242, as well as her influential Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). 45.  I agree with Gatti in rejecting Yates’s hermetic explanation of Bruno’s error (and indeed with her more general critique of the “hermeticized” presentation of Bruno as such), though for different reasons than those she presents (Gatti attempts to harmonize Bruno’s explanation with several arguments from Book 3 of De revolutionibus) (Gatti, Renaissance Science, 64–71). For another argument emphasizing the importance of the literary and rhetorical context of Cena over and against hermetically inclined interpretations, see Adi Ophir, Introduction to B, esp. xx–xxxix. 46.  B, 191; A, 177. 47.  B, 201; A, 181. Bruno writes of judging whether metaphors are “costante.” 48.  B, 193; A, 178. 49.  B, 201; A, 181. 50.  B, 197; A, 180. 51.  B, 195–197; A, 179. Teofilo speaks of “il particular intendimento” at work in philosophical thought. 52.  Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), 152; The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), 175. 53.  Benjamin, Ursprung, 153; Origin, 175. 54.  Benjamin, Ursprung, 144–145; Origin, 166. 55.  This description of the episteme of the late Renaissance appears in the second chapter of Les mots et les choses, where Foucault’s analysis of “signatures” derives

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primarily from an engagement with Oswald Croll’s Tractatus de signaturis internis rerum in Basilica Chymica (Geneva: Samuel Chouce, 1658 [c. 1590]) (Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard, 1966, 32–59). Foucault’s third chapter analyzes the break with this structure and the rise of an episteme of representation in the early seventeenth century (Ibid., 60–91). 56.  Ibid., 70; The Order of Things, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 56. 57.  On the first of these criticisms, see Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination: From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 28–37; and George Huppert, “Divinatio et Eruditio: Thoughts on Foucault,” History and Theory 13.3 (Oct. 1974): 191–207. On the second criticism, see André Robinet, “Leibniz: La Renaissance et l’Âge Classique,” in Leibniz et la Renaissance, ed. Albert Heinekamp, Studia Leibnitiana Supplementa 13 (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1983), 32–36.

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The Function of Allegory in Baroque Tragic Drama What Benjamin Got Wrong blair hoxby

In The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), Walter Benjamin characterizes mourning, melancholy, and the allegorical way of seeing as points of a single constellation: the Trauerspiel. Although Trauerspiel literally means “mourning play,” Benjamin applies the term to most tragic drama from Shakespeare to Schiller to differentiate it from the tragedy of ancient Athens (Tragödie). Attic tragedy is grounded in myth, and its hero, says Benjamin, is always the same. “In tragedy pagan man realizes that he is better than the gods, but this realization strikes him dumb, and it remains unarticulated.” The “sublime element of tragedy” is “the paradox of the birth of genius in moral speechlessness, moral infantility.”1 According to Benjamin, Shakespeare, Calderon, and their contemporaries in Germany did not write tragedies. They wrote Trauerspiele, which sprang from different historical circumstances and yield a different truth when subjected to critical pressure. Trauerspiele are grounded in history rather than myth. They are earthbound and corporeal. They cling to life. Their central characters are the tyrant and martyr, who embody the mysteries of absolute will and hapless subjection and who often appear on stage

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as different aspects of the same sovereign ruler. Their true roots cannot be found in Attic tragedy, or even in Aristotle’s Poetics (the authority that seems to have exercised such an influence on baroque dramaturgy), but in the mystery cycles and the revival of Senecan tragedy in a Christian culture. Their favored mode of expression is ranting, talking, and lamenting. They require an audience to behold their memorabilia of grief, but they are not intended to induce a response of mourning; rather, they are plays directed at the permanently mournful—the melancholy.2 Their characteristic stage property is the corpse. For it is only in death, says Benjamin, that the body “comes properly into its own”: “the allegorization of the physis,” or the natural, “can only be carried through in all its vigour in respect of the corpse. And the characters of the Trauerspiel die, because it is only thus, as corpses, that they can enter the homeland of allegory.”3 Benjamin’s conception of baroque allegory is heavily reliant on the historical narrative told by Karl Giehlow.4 According to Giehlow, medieval allegory was Christian and didactic. In the Renaissance, on the other hand, the neoplatonists who attempted to decipher the hieroglyphs of the Egyptians believed that the pictorial writing of the ancients might hold the keys to the book of nature. Egyptian priests “must have wanted to create something corresponding to divine thought,” concluded Marsilio Ficino, “since divinity surely possesses knowledge of all things, not as a changing idea, but as the simple and fixed form of the thing itself.” That meant that hieroglyphs were “an image of divine ideas.”5 Guided by ancient allegorical commentators, the authors of neoplatonic allegories ransacked the classics for myths and images because they believed that these held the secrets of the supersensible world. But as emblem books were published at a prodigious rate from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, the result was not a mastery of the book of nature; it was a chaos of codes. Egyptian, Hebrew, Greek, and Christian signs were combined and recombined in ever more remote and obscure allegories. Eventually, Giehlow maintains, “one and the same thing [could] just as easily signify a virtue as a vice, and therefore more or less anything.”6 This is the state of allegory in the Trauerspiel, says Benjamin: “any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else.”7 Benjamin does not conceive of allegory as a rhetorical figure or dramatic device used to induce an affective or cognitive response in the audience. Instead, he thinks of it as a state of vision produced by the clash of pagan naturalism and Christian spiritualism during the Middle Ages and the

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Counter-Reformation. Or, alternatively, he describes it as a way of seeing engendered by melancholy. Although he offers a desultory historical account of the origin of that melancholy in the German poets who concern him most (Lutheranism deprived all human actions of value and made the “scene” of human existence “appear like a rubbish heap of partial, inauthentic actions”), he makes no special effort to explain the fact that the greatest masters of allegorical drama were Catholics like Don Pedro Calderón de la Barca—presumably because his more settled conviction is, as Howard Caygill explains, that “Melancholy is in the world and the creature, not necessarily in the gaze of man: human melancholy . . . is but an aspect of a general ontological melancholy, not its source and privileged center.”8 If a cause for that ontological melancholy can be located in Benjamin’s thought, it must be the inadequacy of our fallen tongues, which he imagines to be the mere ruins of a divinely dictated language that consisted only of proper names. As humans gaze at nature with the eye of melancholy, they try to read what they can no longer name with that divine language, and they impute allegorical significance to the lifeless objects they behold. For a time, they may accept these as a “key to the hidden realm of knowledge,” but the gulf between sign and signified inevitably reasserts itself. As a result, the “disconsolate every day countenance” of the “banal object” reemerges, and we abandon the “exhausted emblem” in disappointment.9 Benjamin does not imagine himself as a historian of mentalité or a literary critic. He asserts that he is writing a form of criticism that will yield a philosophic truth by “mortifying” an artistic form; whereas Romantic critics imagined their objective to be “awakening the consciousness in living works,” Benjamin describes his as “the settlement of knowledge in dead ones.”10 The knowledge that the Trauerspiel yields to Benjamin is not, however, what we might expect either from its macabre imagery or his own morbid preoccupations: Ultimately in the death-signs of the baroque the direction of the allegorical reflection is reversed; on the second part of its wide arc it returns, to redeem. . . . Allegory, of course, thereby loses everything that was most peculiar to it: the secret, privileged knowledge, the arbitrary rule in the realm of dead objects, the supposed infinity of a world without hope. All this vanishes with this one about-turn, in which the immersion of allegory has to clear away the final phanstasmagoria of the objective and, left entirely to its own devices, re-discovers itself, not playfully in the earthly world of things, but seriously under the eye of heaven. And this is the essence of

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melancholy immersion: that its ultimate objects, in which it believes it can most fully secure for itself that which is vile, turn into allegories, and that these allegories fill out and deny the void in which they are represented, just as, ultimately, the intention does not faithfully rest in the contemplation of bones, but faithlessly leaps forward to the idea of resurrection.11

Benjamin, at this point in the Origin, is not explaining the way that baroque audiences understood the emblems of the Trauerspiel. He is interpreting its ruins and corpses as Kabbalists read the Torah of the Exile—to divine its opposite, the Torah of Redemption.12 He is reading the Trauerspiel for its message of consolation, however fleeting. Benjamin’s Origin is a difficult work to refute or correct because it contains so many unstated assumptions, hermetic pronouncements, and contradictory assertions that any positive claim ascribed to it can be disputed with a contradictory statement found elsewhere in the text. But I would nevertheless insist that Benjamin’s idea of tragedy underrates the centrality of mourning as a motive and theme of Attic drama and fails to account for works like the Ajax, the Philoctetes, or the Trojan Women—no doubt because they resemble their supposed antithesis, the Trauerspiel, and because recognizing their existence might undercut Benjamin’s claim that the baroque era has more in common with the Middle Ages than it does with the ancient world or the Renaissance.13 My concern in this essay, however, is not Benjamin’s idea of classical tragedy but how allegory functions in baroque tragic drama. I would like to approach this question only after dispensing with some of Benjamin’s most intractable assumptions: that our tongues are the relics of a divine language whose loss makes nature mourn; that melancholy pervades nature and humanity; and that the allegories of the Trauerspiel can be understood only “from the higher domain of theology.”14 We need accept none of these assumptions if we investigate the function of allegory as students of theater and ritual, accepting as an alternative starting point Victor Turner’s model of the relationship that exists between social dramas and the dramas that are performed in theaters. Social dramas are actual social conflicts that often unfold through the four stages of breach, crisis, redressive process, and reintegration or schism.15 If the theater may be said to hold a mirror up to them, it is the third stage, with its wars, judicial deliberations, divinations, sacrifices, rituals of affliction, and life crisis rituals, that preoccupies tragedy. Although many of the redressive processes that may be dramatized in the theater are not rituals

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(or, like revenge killings, are not simply rituals), those that are often take the form of rites of passage that comprise three stages: rites of separation (which communicate society’s deepest values through the exhibition of sacred symbols, the imparting of instructions, or the enactment of myths); rites of limen (which rely on the ludic or fanciful deconstruction and recombination of familiar cultural configurations); and rites of reaggregation (which reestablish lines of authority or seal communal bonds). I introduce this model because Benjamin is careful to deny that Trauerspiele “cause mourning.” He instead imagines them as doleful visions that afford “the only pleasure that the melancholic permits himself”—“allegory.”16 I maintain, in contrast, that the primary function of allegory in baroque tragic drama is to create a theater of the limen, a space betwixt-and-between the living and the dead, a world of dying and mourning. The pleasure that baroque tragic drama delivers is remembrance amid grief. The eminent philologist Daniel Heinsius says as much in his authoritative guide to the Poetics and to tragedy in general. “Not every pleasure is to be sought from tragedy but the one proper to it,” he writes in 1611. Although tragedy “moves either horror or pity or both,” and although “those emotions in themselves properly beget sorrow, . . . the imitation of them breeds pleasure.” This paradox, says Heinsius, may be explained by an observation found in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, “that there is pleasure in grief and mourning, as when we mourn the dead”: For grief has its origin in the person who is gone, but pleasure arises from remembrance of the person that was—from his deeds, from his sayings, things that we vividly recall. Hence by (as it were) divine inspiration in the poet, Andromache says, when she mourns her spouse, that the greatest pleasure had been taken from her, for she had not received his last words and behests to keep in mind night and day, and Lucan’s Polla continuously gazed on the face of the man whom she mourned unceasingly.17

Heinsius’s commentary invites us to read Trauerspiele and other forms of early modern tragic drama as plays that were consciously crafted to afford audiences the pleasure occasioned by grief. We should not be surprised, therefore, to see them appropriate the forms and ceremonies of mortuary rites and funerary memorials. When we consider Trauerpsiele as liminoid plays of mourning, their allegory no longer seems to be arbitrary, horizontal, and binary, as Benjamin characterizes it. In fact, what is most important about the allegory of

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b­ aroque tragic drama is not its status as allegory at all but its inseparability from the mimetic surface of the drama. If we imagine the relationship between mimesis and allegory in plastic terms, we can say that the characters and properties of baroque tragic drama are like those theriomorphic figures who, with their dual natures as beast and human, mortal and god, tend to make their appearance in liminal rites. Or if we express the relationship in temporal terms, we can say that the mimetic surface looks lovingly back to the life of the flesh and the community of the living, while the allegorical depth looks impatiently forward to the company of the dead and a final revelation. The tension between surface and depth, nostalgia and anticipation leaves the audience neither here nor there but in the transitional space betwixt and between. If handled differently, such a tension could be exploited to initiate participants into a mystery like marriage rather than death, but in baroque tragic drama its function is to induce a response of mourning. To make my case, I want both to meet Benjamin on his own ground and to conjoin territory to this investigation of tragic allegory that he would have considered alien. Although Benjamin considers Hamlet (1601) to be the greatest example of the Trauerspiel, he also maintains that derivative and decadent works of art often reveal the most about the nature of a genre, and because I agree I want to focus on a series of tragic dramas that meditate on Hamlet’s dialogue with the grave-diggers: Henry Chettle’s Tragedy of Hoffman (1603?), Thomas Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy (1606) and Lady’s Tragedy (1611), and John Ford’s Love’s Sacrifice (1628). The capstone of this series is Ford’s The Broken Heart (1629–1633), a tragedy that conforms closely to Benjamin’s description of the Trauerspiel. It assigns the role of the tyrant to an honorable but erring brother who condemns his sister to a “resolved martyrdom” (3.2.84) of “tortures,” “agonies,” “miseries,” and “afflictions” (4.4.34–35).18 It features patient women who impose rules of physical self-denial on themselves so extreme as to guarantee death. It invites us to listen to the agonies of the saints, however much their groans may be transmuted into artful and ritualized expressions of pain and grief. It identifies the world with the stage and the stage with the world. It associates tragedy with the Dance of Death and other games of lamentation. It kills its characters so that it may use their corpses as stage properties. And it assumes a deep, if mysterious, relationship between mourning, melancholy, and the allegorical way of seeing. The Broken Heart permits us to examine the function of allegory in a play that is as close to “mortuary art” as Benjamin could desire.

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I want to pair The Broken Heart with a work that Benjamin would not have considered a Trauerspiel: Nahum Tate and Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (1684–1689). This pairing permits us to test Benjamin’s claim that the Trauerspiel bears no comparison to musical tragedy or opera, and— because they are present in The Broken Heart and absent from Dido and Aeneas—it encourages us to ask whether the skulls, corpses, and ruins on which Benjamin dwells are really essential to the resonance of mourning.

we w ho wer e living ar e now dying w i t h a l i t t l e pat i e nc e Benjamin writes as if the deaths that occur in Trauerspiele were an unimportant preliminary to the production of inanimate stage properties. But what is more striking about these plays is their determination to make the living dwell with the dying—with those who are neither fully alive nor completely dead and forgotten. Hamlet must share the stage with the ghost of a father “Doomed for a certain time to walk the night/And for the day confined to fast in fires” (1.5.10–11), with the guts of a counselor being eaten by “a certain convocation of politic worms” (4.3.19–20), with the shell of a girl whose wits are distracted, and then with the corpse of the same girl, denied the full rites of burial.19 Hoffman lives in a cave by the shore, where he keeps the “bare anatomy” of his father suspended in a tree. When the son of his father’s killer comes into his power, Hoffman exacts a mimetic revenge: He places a burning crown on the victim’s head so that his brains boil, his sinews shrink, his blood dissolves, and his nerves and tendons fail. He then pares the flesh from the bones and chains the skeleton next to the “dead remembrance” of his “living father” (1.1.8), whom he addresses in the second person like one of the living.20 Nor is Hoffman the only one to treat these anatomies as if they were not quite inanimate: Lucibella, who is herself suspended between life and death (because she has been stabbed and is mad with grief ), addresses them as “leane porters” (5.1.1948) and “staru’d ghosts” (5.1.2070–2071). The Vindice of The Revenger’s Tragedy also lives with a reminder of the wrong done to him—the “sallow picture” of his “poisoned love,” a “shell of death” (1.1.14–15).21 Not only does he address this relic as “thou” and “madam,” he deceives the lecherous Duke into ­making a fatal

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attempt on it: What the Duke takes for a masked lady is in fact the skull of his victim smeared with poison. To be sure, there are moments in these plays when a character interprets a skull as a memento mori, and if he is given to melancholy like Hamlet or Vindice, he may indulge in an interpretive excess that makes us acutely aware of his willfulness as an allegorist. But such moments are isolated and can scarcely justify the presence of so many characters and properties on stage that are neither wholly alive nor fully dead and gone. These have another and more crucial function: They present death not as an instantaneous event but as a transition that has a duration of its own; and, as such, they transform a binary opposition into a rite of passage whose stages can be marked by rites of separation, transition, and incorporation. We might expect that rites of separation would be the most important component of funeral ceremonies; but, as Arnold van Gennep observed almost a century ago, the transition rites of death rituals “have a duration and complexity sometimes so great that they must be granted a sort of autonomy.”22 In some societies, the liminal period of death is thought to begin when victims breathe their last and to end when the flesh has fallen from the bones or the liquid has drained from their bodies. Until then, mortals are considered neither alive nor finally dead, and their spirits may lurk near their remains or haunt their kin. The end of the liminal period is often marked by a reprocessing or reburial of the remains.23 Even in early modern England, where this sort of reburial was not practiced, death was not imagined as an instantaneous event that terminated with the last breath of the victims.24 In his final sermon, which he delivered from the pulpit while wrapped in his own winding sheet, John Donne could ask, “Is that dissolution of body and soule, the last death that the body shall suffer?” And he could reply, “It is not. Though this be exitus a morte, it is introitus in mortem: though it bee an issue from the manifold deaths of this world, yet it is an entrance into the death of corruption and putrefaction and vermiculation and incinceration, and dispersion in and from the grave, in which every dead man dyes over againe.”25 In medieval and Renaissance England, the desire to distinguish between the natural and the political bodies of the king, the former “subject to all infirmities that come by Nature or Accident” and the latter “utterly void of Infancy, of old Age, and other natural Defects and Imbecilities, which the Body natural is subject to,” led to the use of effigies in royal funerals.26 At the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, her natural body was left to lie in state,

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where she was attended by her Council and served “as though she were not wrapped in many a fold of cere-cloth, and hid in such a heap of lead, of coffin, of pall, but walking as she used to do at this season, about the alleys of her garden.”27 The focal point of her funeral procession was not, however, her corpse but a lifelike effigy that was “crowned in her Parliament Robes” and set atop the “balmed and leaded” corpse.28 When onlookers “beheld her statue and picture lying upon the coffin set forth in Royall Robes,” reports John Stow, there was “a generall sighing and groning, and weeping,” the like of which had “not beene seene or knowne in the memorie of man.”29 Historians have wondered whether this could be true, for the popularity of the queen had declined by her death, but grief was not simply a private and spontaneous effusion in early modern England; it was a public and scripted performance of proper feeling. By the time of James I’s funeral, it was his effigy that lay in state for a month, attended by courtiers and provided with food. The funerals of the Roman emperors served as a precedent for this observance. After the corpse of Septimius Severus was interred, for example, his followers laid out his effigy on a bed in the imperial palace, where he was surrounded by senators and matrons. The emperor’s physicians visited the effigy each day and declared him to be sicker and sicker until, after a week, they pronounced him dead. They then carried the effigy to the old market place, where Roman magistrates rendered up their offices, and thence to a pyre on the Campus Martius.30 The care lavished on these effigies underlines the importance of protracting the liminal period of dying to give scope to mourning. Baroque tragic drama strives for a similar effect by representing death not as a discrete event but as a transformation that unfolds through time and that may continue after characters have breathed their last. In The Lady’s Tragedy, for example, the dead Lady is disinterred by the Tyrant, who is determined to vent his lust on her corpse even though he could not possess her living body: Her spirit continues to walk the stage costumed, like the corpse, in black velvet and a crucifix. Only upon her reinterment does the play treat her as fully dead. In Love’s Sacrifice, on the other hand, Fernando protracts the liminal period of dying by anticipating his own suicide. For a time, he lives with the dead in a sepulchre, wrapped in a winding sheet. But perhaps no English Trauerspiel is more single-mindedly committed to representing death as a process than The Broken Heart.31 Ithocles sets the tragic action in motion by forcing his sister Penthea to marry the jealous

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old nobleman Bassanes rather than the man she loves, Orgilus. She dies of grief, and Orgilus takes his revenge by inviting Ithocles to sit opposite her corpse in a mechanical chair that renders him incapable of defending himself. As the court revels unaware of these terrible events, messengers bring the princess Calantha terrible news: The king, her father, has died of old age, her companion Penthea has starved, and her bethrothed Ithocles has been murdered. She orders the execution of Orgilus, makes preparations for her own coronation as queen, marries the corpse of Ithocles, and dies of a broken heart, thus fulfilling the prophecy, When youth is ripe, and age from time doth part, The lifeless trunk shall wed the broken heart. (5.3.99–100)

What such a bare outline cannot begin to express is how protracted the play’s deaths are. Penthea begins to die the moment she is “buried” in a “bride-bed” (2.2.38), but we watch her waste away, lose her ability to menstruate, go mad, and die over the course of three acts that prove the contention of her “deathful air”: “Love’s martyrs must be ever, ever dying” (4.3.155, 153; my emphasis). Left to choose the manner of his own execution, Orgilus elects to bleed to death slowly, thus reducing a vital masculine body to a “bloodless” corpse (5.2.158). And even Ithocles, who dies quickly enough from his wounds, continues to be dressed and addressed as one of the living. All these characters project a special theatrical power because they have left the profane world and entered a world of the dying that lies close to the core of social value and theatrical meaning.32 Because the early modern tragic stage was routinely draped with the black cloths employed for funerals, its trappings would have primed the audience to assume the role of mourners.33 But the play’s penchant for paradox and chiasmus—so nicely exemplified by Donne’s title, “Against the Dying Life, and Living Death of the Body”—would have reinforced the audience’s impression that they were sharing a liminal space with the dying. The Broken Heart bristles with contradictions like “earthly immortality” (2.2.88) and “desires infinite, but hopes impossible” (3.2.49). It asks unanswerable questions like, “Can you grasp a sigh?” (3.1.5). And it confuses life and death, womb and tomb, cure and bane, dream and reality: “I could wish/That the first pillow whereon I was cradled/Had proved to me a grave” (3.2.36–38), “That remedy/Must be a winding sheet “(3.4.31–32), “I’ve slept/With mine eyes open a great while” (4.2.73–74).

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The play’s perfect balance between mimesis and allegory, representation and memorial is another ludic deconstruction and recombination that holds the audience in the transitional space occupied by the dying and the mourning. For even as Ford asks the audience to see and hear the actors on stage as embodied presences, he transforms them into markers for something other or beyond.34 He does so by unleashing the emotive force of what Aby Warburg calls Pathosformeln, or formulas of pathos, even as he subjects these formulas to the violence of allegorical interpretation.35 His play is punctuated, in other words, by dramatic moments when the unmediated, mimetic energy of the actors seems to fight with only partial success against being seen through. Such a tension between mimesis and allegory, pathos and emblem, is sustained by a good deal of Renaissance and baroque art. Take, for example, Lucas Furtenagel’s The Burgkmaier Spouses (1529). The flesh of the aging couple is rendered in lifelike detail, and the expressive force of their countenances conveys all the pathos of aging, but the death’s heads visible in a convex mirror also imply that this couple can see the skull beneath the skin and the death that will meet them after life (Figure 4.1). In their own eyes and in the eyes of the viewer, they possess a double nature (both alive and dead) and they occupy two times (both now and hereafter). An engraving in Andreas Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543) is likewise haunting because the skeleton assumes the posture of a contemplative man even as the skull he looks at seems to transfer its emblematic significance to his bones, wrestling a formula of pathos into submission and transforming it into a memento mori (Figure 4.2). In The Broken Heart, Penthea weeps and hangs her head because “the Demission or hanging down of the Head is the Consequence of Grief and Sorrow.”36 We see three examples of demission in Pieter Paul Rubens’s Entombment (Figure 4.3)—a gesture to which Penthea herself draws attention: There’s not a hair Sticks on my head but like a leaden plummet It sinks me to the grave. (4.2.76–78)

Penthea’s own words also invite us, however, to compare her to that emblem of saintly affliction, the palm tree exercised by plumb weights: Virtue grows beneath weights (Figure 4.4). Penthea’s death is marked by a similar tension between theatrical presence and allegorical interpretation. It is announced

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Figure 4.1.  Lucas Furtenagel, The Burgkmaier Spouses (1529) (Der Maler Hans Bugkmair und seine Frau Anna, geb. Allerlai ). Kunsthistorisches Museum, Wien oder KHM, Vienna.

by a dirge heard offstage, whose affective force depends on music’s power to sway the passions, yet we can scarcely fail to notice that at the moment of her death, Penthea is reduced to the meaning of her name, “Complaint.” Orgilus’s insistence on standing up as he bleeds to death suggests that he knows the theatrical power of a stance, but he also transforms himself into an

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Figure 4.2.  Andreas Vesalius, De Humani Corporis Fabrica, plate 22. In an earlier version of the plate, the tomb featured the motto, Vivitur ingenio, caetera mortis erunt, “Genius lives on, other things are mortal.” Courtesy of Harvey Cushing/John Jay Whitney Medical Library, Yale University.

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Figure 4.3.  Peter Paul Rubens, The Entombment (c. 1612). Oil on canvas, 131 3 130 cm. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

emblem when he provides a motto for the spectacle: “Revenge proves its own executioner” (5.2.147). This is characteristic of a play that is careful to provide a physiological explanation of its heroine’s death—her heart breaks because she refuses to weep and thus to vent the fluids congregating morbidly around her heart—yet expects us to remember that broken hearts are a part of the emblem tradition (Figure 4.5).37 We can never be sure when to see the characters’ stage actions as Pathosformeln and when to view them as emblems. They possess the double nature and duple time of the body of Christ in Rubens’s Entombment, which is both a luminous corpse disfigured with blood and, as the wheat beneath him on the tomb/altar indicates, a sacrament—the elevated body and blood of Christ. The corpse of Ithocles

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Figure 4.4  Palm tree exercised by leaden plummets. Detail from the engraved frontispiece to Eikon Basilike (1649). Courtesy of Beinecke Rare Books Library, Yale University.

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Figure 4.5.  Anonymous, Venus and the Lover (c. 1485). Single leaf woodcut, colored, by Master Caspar, 25.7 3 36.5 cm. Regensburg, Germany. Inv. 467-1908. Photo: Joerg P. Anders. Kupferstichkabinett, Staaliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany. Photo Credit: Bildarchiv Preussicher Kulturbesltz/ Art Resources, NY.

is the most memorable example of this effect in the play. It is dressed in the trappings of royalty like an effigy, yet it is a natural body: It thus conflates the corruptible and imperishable aspects of the self that were distinguished in royal funeral ceremonies and transi-tombs (Figure 4.6). By providing an allegorical gloss on the name of each of his characters in the frontmatter, Ford invites us to interpret his entire play not only as an imitation of an action but as a dramatic allegory. In the theater, however, it is the play’s memorable triumphs and funerals-as-triumphs that seem to solicit allegorical interpretation most urgently. Much as the pageant wagons of Petrarch’s Trionfi supersede each other in a meaningful progression from Love, through Chastity, Death, Fame, and Time, to Eternity, the triumphs of The Broken Heart tell their own stories when viewed in sequence. Penthea’s life unfolds like a pageant led by Love, Chastity, Death, Memory, and Truth, while Ithocles enjoys “triumphs” as a conqueror, a sacrifice, and

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Figure 4.6.  Tomb of Bishop Thomas Bekingham (c. 1451), Wells Cathedral. By permission of the Chapter of Wells Cathedral.

a corpse. Always we see and hear of progresses, chariots, and triumphs, and we witness characters, and particularly Ithocles, seated or carried in seats (Figure 4.7). Dramatic action is carefully balanced against allegorical pageant to produce a sacred theater of the limen. As they approach their ends, the characters of The Broken Heart see their actions from the detached perspective of a theater audience. Bassanes, for example, speaks of Orgilus as if he were a puppet sent to torment him and praises his grizzly suicide as a “majestical” “pastime” (4.3.106, 105). He perceives even Calantha’s death as a part she has played (5.2.96). But it is Penthea who states the theme most fully: On the stage Of my mortality, my youth hath acted Some scenes of vanity, drawn out at length By varied pleasures, sweetened in the mixture, But tragical in issue. (3.3.15–19)

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Figure 4.7.  A Roman corpse being displayed during a funeral oration. Thomaso Porcacchi, Funerali antichi de diversi populi et nationi (Venice, 1574), Plate 8, page 59. Engraving by Girolamo Porro. Houghton Library, Typ 525.74.707 (A), Harvard University.

Penthea, in other words, approaches the state of mind at which René Descartes believed great souls would arrive when they considered themselves as imperishable souls inhabiting vulnerable and short-lived bodies: For, on the one hand, considering themselves as immortals and as capable of receiving very great contentment, and, on the other hand, considering that they are joined to fragile mortal bodies, which are subject to many infirmities and which will inevitably perish in a few years, they do every­ thing in their power to render Fortune favorable in this life, but they nevertheless esteem it so little in relation to Eternity that they come close to considering events as we do plays. And just as the sad and lamentable stories we see represented in the theater often give us as much recreation as cheerful ones do, even though they bring tears to our eyes, so the greatest souls I speak of derive satisfaction within themselves from everything that happens to them, no matter how upsetting and unbearable; and thus, feeling pain in their bodies, they apply themselves to bear it patiently, and the proof of their strength which they get in this way is pleasant to them.38

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Calantha smiles in death to crack her heart, it is true, but the proof of her own strength may also be pleasing to her. If the tension between mimetic energy and allegorical signification helps to plunge the audience into the betwixt-and-between world of the dying and the mourning, it also helps them to put the fragility of their own bodies and the permanence of eternity into perspective so that they may know when to rejoice, sorrow, or commiserate in due measure. Such a habit of proper feeling could be formed by watching tragedies, said Heinsius, because: Just as anyone who with long practice has readied himself for performance, properly executes a given art, so by a certain conditioning to the objects by which the passions of the soul are stimulated, their mean is induced. . . . This is what the things exhibited in the theater must answer to, because it is a kind of training hall of our passions which (since they are not only useful in life but necessary) must therefore be readied and perfected.39

The allegory of The Broken Heart is not a melancholy indulgence, it is a dramatic device intended to generate a response of mourning even as it tempers that response by means of the split-consciousness of Fortune and Eternity that Descartes describes.

when i am laid in earth I want to turn now to Dido and Aeneas (1684–1689) so that we can consider the affective function of the struggle between representation and memorial in a drama whose allegorical properties are far removed from the skulls, anatomies, and ruins that lead Benjamin to describe allegory as a mortuary art. Although Naham Tate’s libretto retells Book 4 of the Aeneid, it values affective bonds, passive suffering, and elegiac recollection more highly than the Virgilian values of piety, labor, and empire. By introducing a coven of witches who send a spirit in the guise of Mercury to instruct Aeneas to leave Carthage, it undermines Virgil’s claims that Rome was fated to sway the world and that the cause of empire requires personal sacrifice. And by declining to have Dido curse her faithless lover and then stab herself with his sword on their bed, it quickens our sympathy for a wronged queen, implying that her suffering, which is caused by the indubitable passions of her soul and is sufficient to break her heart, is in some sense better founded,

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more real, more true than the life of action to which Aeneas heads— founded, as it is, on an illusory imperative. Although Dido and Aeneas draws on many musical and theatrical traditions, including the Stuart masque, Italian opera, French chamber opera, and Sir William Davenant’s spectacular, operatic production of Macbeth, its most important model is the Venus and Adonis (1682) of Henry Purcell’s teacher John Blow, a fully sung masque that, like Dido and Aeneas, opens with an allegorical prologue, unfolds in three acts with allegorical dances, and concludes with a chorus that laments the untimely and passive death of its hero. The basic dramatic unit of both works progresses from recitative through air, chorus, and dance. But Purcell lends a greater sense of structure and momentum to his opera by introducing three ground basses that define the key centers of the acts (C minor, D minor, and G minor) and that direct all the tragedy’s lines of sight toward a single terminus.40 Because I want to focus on the tension between mimetic energy and emblematic significance that builds as the opera’s music and dance converge on Dido’s final lament, I propose to follow three key elements through the action. The first is Purcell’s use of modal affects or key feelings to express particular passions or to signal dramatic relationships. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, music theorists and composers expended a great deal of effort trying to revive the eight ancient modes of music, which were thought to have had the power to arouse and assuage the soul at will. These ancient modes were supposed to have operated directly on the soul, without depending on conventional associations or emblematic meanings, but as baroque theorists published various schemes of what were sometimes called the character (ethos) or energy (energeia) of the modes, particular modes did take on conventional associations and invite allegorical interpretations. Although Purcell left no written scheme codifying his own practice, his selection of modes (which I shall henceforth refer to as our modern keys) is systematic. The second element I want to focus on is Purcell’s use of ground basses. By the time Purcell was writing, something like a musical rhetoric of the passions had already been established by composers like Monteverdi and Cavalli working in the opera houses of Venice. One of Monteverdi’s most widely admired expressions of grief was his ostinato bass with a descending minor tetrachord.41 In his “Lament of the Nymph,” the insistent and repetitive downward pull of the bass line suggests an emotional distress that borders on distraction; it gives the passions a musical embodiment that is

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distinct from the voice, which struggles for its own autonomy; and it drags the Nymph relentlessly down to despair and death. This bass had already served as an emblem of lament in Cavalli’s Egisto (1642) and numerous other operas and cantatas by the mid-seventeenth century, so by the time Purcell used it in the 1680s, it was a musical device balanced on the knife’s edge of mimetic energy and allegorical significance. The final element I shall follow is the dances that punctuate the action of Dido and Aeneas. One group of dances exhibits the virtues of the sexes and doubles the courtship plot. In the Renaissance, dance was thought to inculcate the virtues proper to the sexes in the kinesthetic memories of the dancers, teaching men to be “fiers, hardy, stronge in opinion, couaitous of glorie, desirous of knowledge, [and] appetiting by generation to bryinge forth [their] semblable” and training women to be “milde, timorouse, tractable, benigne, of sure remembrance, and shamfast.”42 Although dance was thought to be a somatic expression of the soul, its scripted bodily motions also bore within themselves “wonderfull figures or as the grekes do calle them Ideae.”43 The allegorical character of court dances was most clearly displayed in masques, which, by bringing dancing Cupids on stage, often invoked the Orphic and neoplatonic myth that Primal Love first taught the starry quires how to dance: To dance in a masque was to instantiate the harmony of the cosmos in court and to tune one’s soul to the heavens. But the belief that men and women were microcosms of the universe who might attune themselves to its spiritual influences by manipulating occult resemblances, or by performing the motions proper to celestial bodies, also invested such figured dances with all the mysterious potential of magic— whether benign or demonic.44 The remaining dances of Dido and Aeneas exploit both the light and the dark side of this neoplatonic model of dance: They put allegory into action. I would like to begin with Act 1 because the music for the allegorical prologue to Dido and Aeneas is lost. The action commences with a French overture whose fugal second section in C minor immerses the audience in the atmosphere of anxiety and depression oppressing Dido’s court. Its chromaticism and the eighth notes of its canzona suggest that Dido’s love is obsessive and destructive, and the insistent descent of its bass imparts a downward momentum to the action before it has even begun. In the first words of the drama, Dido’s confidente Belinda and the chorus try to lift Dido from C minor into the regal and tranquil key of C major, singing, “Shake the clouds from off your brow” and “Banish ­sorrow,

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banish care.”45 Dido confides in recitative written over an ostinato bass that resembles that of a chaconne in a minor key, “Ah! Belinda, I am press’d,/ With torment not to be confess’d.” After the descending bass has been stated nine times, she lifts into a miniature da capo aria whose melody begins as a quotation from the ground, “Peace and I are strangers grown,/I languish till my grief is known,/Yet would not have it guess’d.” When she arrives at, “Yet would not,” she reaches up for the C major to which all her court has been trying to direct her, only to subside back into C minor. Her feeling is so full that an instrumental accompaniment must complete the statement of her passion. Belinda and the Second Woman extol the virtues and attractions of Aeneas, and the queen confesses that her heart, though “with storms of care oppress’d,” “Is taught to pity the distress’d.” Singing in C major and parallel thirds, Belinda and the Second Woman enjoin Dido to fear no danger. When Dido and Aeneas meet for the first time, he asks in the bold and confident key of G major, “When, Royal Fair, shall I be bless’d?,” and Dido, beginning the music’s descent through A minor to E minor, responds, “Fate forbids what you pursue.” After Aeneas responds quite falsely, “Aeneas has no fate but you!” the Chorus, representing the force of desire, intrudes with an air (“Cupid only throws the dart”) whose affecting dissonances on words like dart and heart are intended to express the paradox that love is an agreeable pain. If Dido can be said to “accept” the advances of Aeneas at any time during the drama itself, it is between Belinda’s observation, “her eyes/ Confess the flame her tongue denies” and the choral air that concludes, “Let the triumphs of love and beauty be shown./Go revel, ye Cupids, the day is your own.” The only thing that occurs in the interim is a chaconne, a dance that was thought to have originated in Spain or Africa and that still retained some overtones of the erotic and exotic despite being used as a courtly dance appropriate for weddings. With the triumph of the Cupids that ends the act, G minor, the key in which Dido will die, intrudes with tragic irony. Act 2 consists of three scenes. In the first, the Sorceress and her wayward sisters plot the destruction of Dido. As they sing in C major, they emphasize their resemblance to Dido’s courtiers: Both groups are driving her to her doom, an irony that is emphasized if the same singers appear in both roles. As they sing in G minor, they identify themselves as agents of Dido’s death. The echo dance that the Furies perform after the wayward sisters withdraw into their cell to cast their spell is the opera’s most remarkable

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representation of the demonic potential of neoplatonic allegory. Ficino said that music, in its “airy and rational motions” was a “most powerful imitator of things.”46 The musician projected song (“this potent phantasm”) into the world, where it immediately provoked the singer and the audience to “act out” the things it presented. This is the same theory that underwrote the attempts of court masquers to capture the gifts of the stars through dance. Purcell’s echo dance stages this process by playing a measure that represents the charms being cast by the wayward sisters concealed backstage in their cell, and then repeating it, with slight variations, so that we can see the result of their spells enacted on the forestage by the dance of the Furies—though there is always just a little something lost in the translation. According to some scores, six of the Furies should sink down and another four should fly up at the end of the echo dance. The dance reinforces our brooding sense of the destructive potential of the universe’s malign forces—even when they are not visible on stage. In the second scene, when Dido and Aeneas go hunting, their courtiers sing of Acteon and Adonis, hunters whose violent but passive deaths were attributed to their passions by Ovid’s moralizers. The music insists on the application of the stories to Dido by introducing a vocal ground bass to narrate the death of Acteon—a setting reserved in Acts 1 and 3 for the laments of Dido herself. Then in the third scene, an elf appears in the guise of Mercury to tell Aeneas he must forsake Carthage to restore Troy. Act 3 commences with Aeneas’ sailors deciding to “Take a boozy short leave of your nymphs on the shore,/And silence their mourning/With vows of returning/But never intending to visit them more.” As Curtis Price has observed, the inner couplet of both the air and the chorus is set over a descending tetrachord that anticipates Dido’s final lament.47 Beginning on the note C, the sailors lead to a strong cadence in G minor—a foreshadowing of Dido’s doom. This anticipation of Aeneas’s leave-taking demystifies the hero’s official line. Now the wayward sisters seem to be allied with the chorus of sailors as they delight in Dido’s impending death, just as they were allied with the courtiers of Carthage when they incited her passions. The sailors’ jovial dance brings the opera’s series of courtship dances to a harsh, parodic close. It has an effect that is similar to the jesting of the clown who brings Cleopatra’s asp in the last act of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra: It isolates the tragic heroine and defines the rhetoric, the music, the bodily deportment appropriate to her as distinct, other, higher. When Aeneas appears to take his leave, the queen’s charge that he is a “deceitful crocodile,”

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a “hypocrite,” and a “murderer” shakes his resolve, but Dido then reverses herself and bids him fly to his empire lest she dispose of her life violently. Her threat has the convenient effect of discharging Aeneas from most moral responsibility for her end, and it also permits her to die more peacefully of a broken heart. Once Aeneas has taken his leave, Dido is left alone to sing her own threnody, “Now I am laid in earth.” Her voice is supremely expressive as she intones her final injunction, “Remember me, but ah! forget my fate,” especially as she sings that preverbal expression of grief, “Ah,” then reaches up for the royal key of C major in a final assertion of regal dignity, then collapses into G minor, the key of death in the opera.48 The ostinato bass, which reasserts itself during her final lament, lends a sense of tragic inevitability and momentum to the action. Because it is based on a chaconne, a dance especially associated with weddings in the French musical tradition and probably used to figure her initial acceptance of Aeneas in the opera, it depicts Dido’s decease as a marriage to death. Once Dido has died of a broken heart, the chorus sings its beautiful, communal expression of grief, “With drooping wings you Cupids come/ To scatter roses on her tomb.” In an ending that is omitted in most modern productions, cupids then descend from the clouds and dance about her tomb. The descent of the cupids is a gesture of piteous condescension that appears sharply different from both the cupids’ triumphing dance in Act 1 and the aggressive upward flight of the Furies in Act 2. The cupids’ dances have been recurring throughout the play like the ostinato bass that provides the underpinning for Dido’s lament, and they serve a similar function: they lend a sense of tragic inevitability to the action, they commemorate her death with a conflated wedding revel and funeral ceremony, and they turn Dido’s sacrifice into a ludic lamentation. The way in which the members of the final chorus echo each other is itself an echo of the dance of the Furies. It seems to communicate grief in waves through the community of mourners and out into a wider world connected by invisible sympathies. The dance of the cupids, which is also a dance of the cosmos, then reabsorbs the scattered individual. Dido and Aeneas spares no pains to generate a response of mourning, a response that depends, I would argue, on its balancing of mimetic energy and allegorical significance, its insistence on the vital presence of Dido in a world of shadowy signs and occult resemblances. Yet it also careful to provide the pleasure of grieving, which arises from our remembrance of the

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dead. In The Broken Heart, that pleasure is produced when Penthea asks Calantha to be her “executrix” so that she may “dispose/Such legacies as I bequeth impartially” (3.5.37–38) and when Calantha lays down conditions for a marriage that are really her last will and “testament” (5.3.53). In Dido and Aeneas, it is produced by Dido’s repeated injunction, “Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.” As Lord Kames observed in his analysis of the passions, “Grief is a most painful passion or impression, yet it is the farthest of any thing from being mixed with any degree of aversion. On the contrary, we cling to the object which raises our grief, and love to dwell upon it.”49 No one could wish the lament of Dido or the dirge of the chorus any shorter. In the Origin, Benjamin extracts passages from Trauerspiele and arranges them as if they were so many leaves from the Sybil portending a truth that can only be perceived “from the higher domain of theology.” We can better understand how The Broken Heart and Dido and Aeneas function as dramas of mourning if we interpret them as theatrical representations that, by appropriating the forms of mortuary rituals, dilate our exposure to the dying and transform us into a community of mourners who inhabit the shadowy borderland between life and death—a limen that, as I have tried to suggest in my reading of Dido, we can enter even without the aid of corpses and ruins on stage. This approach not only accounts for the cognitive and affective function of one of the most salient characteristics of baroque tragic drama—its yoking of mimetic energy to allegorical significance—it respects the seventeenth century’s own account of the pleasure that audiences sought from tragic representations: “the pleasure in grief and mourning, as when we mourn the dead.” Notes 1.  Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne, intro. George Steiner (London and New York: Verso, 1998), p. 110, quoting his own “Schicksal und Charakter,” p. 191. On Benjamin’s conception of tragedy, which is deeply influenced by those of Florens Christian Rang, Franz Rosenzweig, Friedrich Nietszche, and Max Scheler, see Benjamin, Origin, esp. pp. 106–118; Ferenc Fehér, “Lukacs and Benjamin: Parallels and Contrasts,” New German Critique 34 (1985): 125–138; Bernd Witte, Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography, trans. James Rolleston (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1991), p. 78; Steiner, introduction, p. 16; and Carrie L. Asman, “Theater and Agon/Agon and Theater: Walter Benjamin and Florens Christian Rang” MLN 107 (1992): 606–624. 2.  Benjamin, Origin, esp. pp. 62, 69–74, 119–138, 182, 198, 217–218.

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3.  Benjamin, Origin, p. 217. On Benjamin’s idea of the Trauerspiel, also see his “Trauerspiel and Tragedy” and “The Role of Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy,” both in Selected Writings, Vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. 55–61; Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), ch. 3; John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), ch. 3; Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993). 4.  Karl Giehlow, “Die Hieroglyphenkunde des Humanismus in her Allegorie der Renaissance besonders der Ehrenpforte Kaisers Maximilian I. Ein Versuch,” ed. Arpad Weixlgärtner, Jahrbuch der kunshistorischen Sammlungen des allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses 32 (1915), also available in Italian translation as Hieroglyphica. La conoscenza umanistica dei geroglifici nell’allegoria del Rinascimento. Una ipotesi, ed. Maurizio Ghelardi and Susanne Müller (Turin: Nino Aragno Editore, 2004). 5.  Giehlow, “Die Hieroglyphenkunde,” p. 23, quoted in Benjamin, Origin, p. 169. 6.  Giehlow, “Die Hieroglyphenkunde,” p. 127, quoted in Benjamin, Origin, p. 174. 7.  Benjamin, Origin, p. 175. For somewhat different accounts of the historical development of allegory, see Gombrich, “Icones Symbolicae: The Visual Image in Neo-Platonic Thought,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 11 (1948): pp. 163–192; and Blair Hoxby, “Allegorical Drama,” in The Cambridge Companion to Allegory, ed. Rita Copeland and Peter Struck (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 8.  Benjamin, Origin, p. 139; Howard Caygill, “Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Cultural History,” in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David S. Ferris (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 88. 9.  Benjamin, Origin, pp. 184–185. 10.  Benjamin, Origin, p. 182. 11.  Benjamin, Origin, pp. 232–233. 12.  See esp. Wolin, Walter Benjamin, ch. 3. 13.  The importance of these plays to the conception of tragedy in the seventeenth century will be one of the themes of my forthcoming Spectacles of the Gods: Tragedy and Tragic Opera, 1550–1780. 14.  Benjamin, Origin, p. 216. 15.  See esp. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ Publications, 1982); and Turner, “Are There Universals of Performance in Myth, Ritual, and Drama?” in By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual, ed. Richard Schechner and Willa Appel (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 8–18. 16.  Benjamin, Origin, pp. 119, 185. Benjamin does not distinguish clearly between mourning and melancholy, but I take his uses of the words mournful and mournfulness on p. 119 to refer to a permanent affect that is a species of melancholy. In keeping with Renaissance usage, I, on the other hand, will employ the word

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mourning to refer to the conscious display of a temporary grief that seeks comfort in the midst of tribulation and heaviness and use the word melancholy to refer to a protracted affective state of grief or dullness whose origin may be ascribed to a predominance of black bile in the blood, the influence of the planet Saturn, or anxiety about religious salvation, and whose symptoms may range from lethargy to furious ire. 17.  Daniel Heinsius, De Tragoediae Constitutione, On Plot in Tragedy (1611), trans. Paul R. Sellin and John J. McManmon (Northridge, CA: San Fernando Valley State College, 1971), p. 47. 18.  All quotations are from John Ford, The Broken Heart, ed. Donald K. Anderson Jr., Regents Renaissance Drama Series (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968). 19.  All quotations are from Hamlet, ed. A. R. Braunmuller (New York: Penguin Books, 2001). For a reading of Hamlet that emphasizes the liminal qualities of purgatory, see Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Prince­ ton University Press, 2001). 20.  All quotations are from Henry Chettle, The Tragedy of Hoffman, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Malone Society, 1950). 21.  All quotations are from Thomas Middleton, The Collected Works, gen. eds. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, 2 vols. (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 2007). 22.  Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee, intro. Solon T. Kimball (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), p. 148. 23.  Robert Hertz, Death and the Right Hand, trans. Rodney and Claudia Needham, intro. E. E. Evans Pritchard (Aberdeen, U.K.: Cohen & West, 1960), pp. 9–86; Richard Huntington and Peter Metcalf, Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 61–92. 24.  Clare Gittings, Death, Burial, and the Individual in Early Modern England (London: Croom Helm, 1984), esp. pp. 19–23. 25.  John Donne, “Death’s Duell, or, a Consolation to the Soule, against the Dying Life, and Living Death of the Body, 25 February 1631,” in Selected Prose, ed. Neil Rhodes (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin Books, 1987), p. 315. 26.  Edmund Plowden, Commentaries or Reports (London: S. Brooke, 1816), 221a; see Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, new pref. by Chester Jordan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). 27.  Calendar of State Papers Domestic 10 (1603–1607), 22, quoted in Jennifer Woodward, The Theatre of Death: The Ritual Management of Royal Funerals in Renaissance England, 1570–1625 (Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell Press, 1997), p. 116. 28.  Henry Chettle, “The Order and Proceeding at the Funerall of the Right and Mighty Princesse Elizabeth Queene of England, France, and Ireland from the

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Palace of Westminster, Called Whitehall: To the Cathedrall Church of Westminster. 28th April 1603,” quoted in Woodward, Theatre of Death, p. 87. 29.  John Stow, The Annales (1615), p. 815, quoted in Woodward, Theatre of Death, p. 88. 30.  Herodian provides the fullest account of the funeral of Septimius Severus. Politian published his Latin translation of Herodian in 1493. French translations appeared in 1541 and 1546. Nicholas Smith published his English translation, The History of Herodian, a Greeke Author, Treating of the Romayne Emperors in 1550; the funeral is described on fols. xlvi–xlvii. See Ralph Giesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France (Geneva: E. Droz, 1960), pp. 147–151, 170. Many books on the burial customs of ancient and foreign peoples were published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Representative examples include Thomaso Porcacchi, Fvnerali antichi de diuersi popoli, et nationi: forma, ordine, et pompa di sepolture, di essequie, de consecrationi antiche et d’altro (Venice, 1574); Claude Guichard, Fvnerailles, & diuerses manieres d’enseuelier des Rommains, Grecs, & autres nations, tant anciennes que modernes (Lyon, 1581); Anon., Of the Antiquity of Ceremonies Used at Funerals in England (London, 1599); Jan Meursius, De funere liber singularis, in quo Graeci et Romani ritus (Hague, 1604); Johann Kirchman, De funeribus Romanorum (Hamburg, 1605); Richard Braithwait, Remains after Death: . . . including divers memorable observances (1618); and Francesco Perucci, Pompe funebri de tutte le nationi del mondo: raccolte dalle storie sagre et profane (Verona, 1639). For some suggestive remarks about the cultural function of effigies, see Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), pp. 36–41; and “Celebrity Erotics: Pepys, Performance, and Painted Ladies,” Yale Journal of Criticism 16 (2003): 211–230. 31.  Critical interpretations of The Broken Heart include R. J. Kaufmann, “Ford’s ‘Waste Land’: The Broken Heart,” Renaissance Drama, n.s. 3 (1970): 167–187; Ronald Huebert, John Ford: Baroque English Dramatist (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1977); Dorothy Farr, John Ford and the Caroline Theatre (London: Macmillan, 1979), pp. 79–104; Michael Neill, “Ford’s Unbroken Art: The Moral Design of ‘The Broken Heart,’” MLR 75 (1980): 249–268; Anne Barton, “Oxymoron and the Structure of Ford’s The Broken Heart,” Essays and Studies 33 (1980): 70–94; Verna Ann Foster and Stephen Foster, “Structure and History in The Broken Heart: Sparta, England, and the ‘Truth,’” English Literary Renaissance, 18 (1988): 305–328; William Dyer, “Holding/Withholding Environments: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Ford’s The Broken Heart,” English Literary Renaissance 21 (1991): 401–424; Lisa Hopkins, John Ford’s Political Theatre (Manchester, U.K., and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994); and Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 354–374. 32.  Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), pp. 93–111. 33.  E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1951), 3:79; M. C. Bradbrook, Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan The-

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atre, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 16–17; Neill, Issues of Death, pp. 282–283. 34.  On “the production of presence,” see Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). 35.  Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, intro. Kurt W. Forster, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), pp. 89, 271, 553–558; Matthew Rampley, The Remembrance of Things Past: On Aby M. Warburg and Walter Benjamin (Weisbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2000), pp. 125–150. On the violence of allegory, see Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). 36.  [Thomas Betterton,] The History of the English Stage (London: Printed for E. Curll, 1741), p. 65. 37.  Michael Neill reproduces this image in his critical interpretation of Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, “‘What Strange Riddle’s This?’: Deciphering ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore,” in John Ford: Critical Re-Visions, ed. Michael Neill (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 38.  René Descartes, Oeuvres des Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, new ed., coed., Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 12 vols. (Paris: Librarie J. Vrin, 1957–1968), 4:202–203; my translation. 39.  Heinsius, De Tragoediae Constitutione, p. 12. 40.  My understanding of the score of Dido and Aeneas has been particularly enriched by Robert Etheridge Moore, Henry Purcell & the Restoration Theatre (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), ch.2; Curtis Price, Henry Purcell and the London Stage (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1984), ch. 5; and Peter Holman, Henry Purcell (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 194–201. 41.  See Ellen Rosand, “The Descending Tetrachord: An Emblem of Lament,” Musical Quarterly 65 (1979): 346–359; Gary Tomlinson, “Madrigal, Monody, and Monteverdi’s ‘Via Naturale all Immitatione,’” Journal of the American Musicological Society 34 (1981): 60–108; Nigel Fortune, “Monteverdi and the seconda prattica,” in The New Monteverdi Companion, ed. Denis Arnold and Nigel Fortune (London: Faber and Faber, 1985), pp. 192–197; and the special issue on laments that appeared in Early Music 27 (1999). 42.  Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour (1531), fol. 82v–fol. 83r. 43.  Elyot, The Boke Named the Governour, fol. 84r. 44.  The magical quality of court masques remains contested. For arguments against it, see for example, D. J. Gordon, The Renaissance Imagination, ed.­ Stephen Orgel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p. 21; and Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), pp. 55–57. On the other hand, ­Orgel’s coauthor Roy Strong stresses the compatibility of neoplatonism and magic in his Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals 1450–1650 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, U.K.:

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Boydel Press, 1984). See also Thomas M. Greene, “Magic and Festivity at the Renaissance Court: The 1987 Josephine Waters Bennet Lecture” Renaissance Quarterly 40 (1987): 636–659. 45.  I follow the text and score printed in Dido and Aeneas: An Opera, ed. Curtis Price, Norton Critical Scores (New York and London: Norton, 1986). 46.  See Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life, ed. and trans. Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clarke (Binghampton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1989), pp. 358–359. 47.  Price, Henry Purcell and the London Stage, p. 254. 48.  Curtis A. Price, “Dido and Aeneas in Context,” in Purcell, Dido and Aeneas: An Opera, p. 36. 49.  Lord Kames, Essays on the Principles of Morality and Religion (Edinburgh: R. Fleming, for A. Kincaid and A. Donaldson, 1751), p. 10.

five

Colonial Allegories in Paris The Ideology of Primitive Art gordon teskey

The center of Paris is bounded on the east and the west by two “woods,” in the manicured, French sense of the word—all that remain of the ancient forests, Lanchonia Silva and the Forêt du Rouvre, now the Bois de Vincennes and the Bois de Boulogne. The river runs between them from east to west, passing to the south of the Bois de Vincennes on its way into the city and, as it leaves the city, turning north to embrace with its right bank the far side of the Bois de Boulogne. The westerly flow of the Seine is an emblem of how Paris works: Following ancient patterns, those who supply labor and goods live upstream from those who receive and consume. On the coat of arms of the city is a ship with the motto, fluctuat nec mergitur: “It goes with the flow, so as not to sink.” Until the Luftwaffe bombed it, there had long been a huge wine market on the upstream right bank at Bercy, near the Bois de Vincennes, whence casks were floated on barges into the city and unloaded at various points, the best wines last.1 Today, the ring-road tunnels beneath the Bois de Vincennes; and, beyond it in industrial Bercy, trucks unload in vast warehouses goods destined for the city. In Paris, luxury, power, and magnificent display flow

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i­nexorably downstream, to the west, from the Bois de Vincennes to the Bois de Boulogne. With its elegant avenues and palatial hideaways for the likes of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, or Princess Di and Dodi Fayed, the Bois de Boulogne is in the westerly part of the aristocratic sixteenth arrondissement, formerly the suburb called the Faubourg Saint-Honoré.2 The Elysée Palace, where the president is lodged, is on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, as are many of Paris’s most elegant shops—there, and on the adjacent Place Vendôme, neighboring the Ritz Hotel. The association of west Paris with conspicuous luxury began in the Renaissance, when the unpopular, fiercely aristocratic second queen of Henri IV, Marie de Medici, disgusted by the rowdy populace around the fortress of the Louvre, extended the royal prospect westward from the Tuileries gardens, planting along the right bank of the Seine the treed alleys of the Cours-la-Reine and beside them the vast gardens that would become the Avenue des Champs Elysées, the Elysian Fields, the most elegant street in the world. In the days of Marie’s grandson, Louis XIV (who was born to the west of the city, in the great château of Saint Germaine-en-Laye), the nobles would travel still farther west, taking the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré out of the city on the way to Versailles. The Bois de Vincennes is at the other, east end of Paris, in the now hip but once unfashionable working-class twelfth arrondissement, which occupies the southern portion of the old Faubourg Saint-Antoine, cradle of the revolutionary mob. It seems right that while he was traveling eastward, on the road to Vincennes, Rousseau would conceive the Social Contract. Although it was once a royal hunting preserve, the Bois de Vincennes, with its vélodrome and its zoo, has long been associated with the people; Saint Louis is said to have rendered popular justice there, under an oak. It was favored for hunting and also less vigorous sports by Marie de Medici’s much more popular husband, Henri de Navarre, the first of the Bourbon kings, who in 1594 ended the decade-long Wars of Religion and won the capital by renouncing his Protestant faith, quipping, “Paris is well worth a mass”—“Paris vaut bien une messe.” He appears in Spenser’s Faerie Queene as Sir Burbon, the knight of the unfaithful Flourdelis (France). In trying to win her back, Sir Burbon shamefully abandons the shield of true religion given him by the Redcross Knight: “That bloudie scutchin being battered sore,/I layd aside, and have of late forebore,/Hoping thereby to have my love obtained.”3 The real Henri had little trouble in that department.

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To the north of the twelfth arrondissement, farther from the Seine, to which it is connected by the canal Saint Martin and the Arsenal Basin, is the eleventh arrondissement, the center of the old Faubourg Saint Antoine, which at the time of the Revolution was outside the city walls, eastward from the heavily fortified Porte Saint Antoine. The most imposing part of those defenses was the eight-towered fortress of the Bastille, which was built to guard Paris’s vulnerable east flank and did so until its capture and dismantling in 1789, the only time it was ever attacked. The Place de la Bastille is still the main rallying point for Paris’s regular demonstrations and strikes, as it was for rejoicing in 1981, after the election of François Mittérand’s socialist government. In solidarity with their electoral base, the socialists rowed, as it were, upstream against the current of power by developing east Paris, building the immense Omnisports Palace and new edifices for the Radio and Television Commission and the Ministry of Economy and Industry. Across the river from these, in the neglected and still more proletarian thirteenth arrondissement, there rose like an apparition the stern ziggurat and towers of the Bibliothèque Nationale de FranceFrancois Mittérand, to give the new national library its full honors. In the Place de la Bastille itself, on its east side, another vast structure was raised: the Opéra de la Bastille, the socialists’ answer to the temple to bourgeois luxury raised during the Second Empire. The building in which the new opera is housed exemplifies how out of place in east Paris official display feels. No one seems to pay much attention to its impassive, stealth-bomber surfaces, not out of dislike but from simple inability to register its presence. All eyes are drawn instead to the great column at the center of the Place de la Bastille commemorating the victims of the July Revolution of 1830 and surmounted by a winged, allegorical statue, the “Genius of Liberty.” Or they are drawn easily past the opera into the lively neighborhood of the Rue de la Roquette, with its outdoor markets; its long-established African and Arab communities; its ateliers of artists, musicians, and fashion designers; and its youth-culture paradise of motorcycle repair shops, grungy bar-cafés, and loud bands. Yet it was in the extreme east of Paris, in 1931, at the entrance to the Bois de Vincennes, in what it would be a joke to call a run-down neighborhood, that France’s Third Republic (1870–1939) staged one of its most impressive official displays: the Exposition Coloniale. The grand exhibitions of the past, so important to the ideological work of official French culture, and

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in particular to that kind of ideological work called allegory, had always been held in west Paris. Of course, the French royalty, like most European monarchs and princes, followed the Italians in designing vast public allegories—notably in the famous royal entrances of the much-traveled Catherine de’ Medici—to embody and nourish the ideological forms of their power. Revolutionary France was remarkable for her use of what we may call festive allegory, in which real people are employed as signifiers of abstract ideas. At the height of the Terror, there were huge allegorical processions on the Champ de Mars to the west of the city to honor the Goddess of Reason and the Supreme Being. By the centenary of the Revolution, which the Third Republic celebrated with the Exposition Universelle of 1889, the Supreme Being was Technology, enshrined in a vast Hall of Machines, sustained by a “Fairy of Electricity” and symbolized by the Eiffel Tower itself, also situated in the west, uniting the earth with the sky. The Exposition Universelle of 1900, on the Champs Elysées, deployed allegorical figures in still greater profusion, for example on the new triumphal bridge dedicated to Tsar Alexander III, which opened a line of sight between the Invalides on the left bank of the Seine and, on the right bank, the astonishing metal and glass structures of the Petit Palais and the Grand Palais, raised for the occasion. The latter is surmounted by spectacular allegorical chariots, executed by the sculptor, Georges Recipon: “Harmony Overcoming Discord” and “Eternity Overcoming Time.” Time with his scythe and Discord with her immense, withered dugs, her contorted visage and her snaky hair, are in the purest iconographical tradition going back to classical times. Likewise, Harmony recalls the classical Apollo and Eternity Apollo’s sister, Athena. The magnificent horses drawing the chariots have the sharp, swift lines of the horses from the Parthenon—on display then, as now, in the British Museum. Nothing less classical in idiom would be acceptable on the Avenue des Champs Elysées. But in east Paris a new kind of allegorical imagery—an imagery of the teratological and the exotic, reminding us of the Africa of Conrad and the South Seas of Melville—was to enlarge the language for allegorical expression in the modern world. The Colonial Exhibition had been decided on as early as 1920, soon after the Pyrrhic victory of World War I, and was intended to assert the defining role of the Third Republic as an apostle of Enlightenment and of universal exchange going forth on the oceans of the world. The Avenue Daumesnil and métro line number 8 had to be extended just to reach the exhibition;

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the Bois de Vincennes was engrossed within the city of Paris; and the name of the Porte de Picpus was changed to Porte Dorée, “Golden Gate,” suggesting an opening out to the rest of the world. Beautifully designed stamps and posters were issued, showing pith-helmeted French officers in exotic locations and also showing the colonial subjects in traditional costumes or in the uniforms of the French overseas forces: elegantly mysterious Southeast Asians, tamed but still savage-looking South Pacific islanders, stately Arabs on camels, and benevolent, towering black Africans near mud buildings in the western Sahara. In all these pictures on posters and stamps, the French flag, the tricouleur, is flying somewhere in the background. On the grounds of the exhibition itself, around the Lac Dausmesnil within the Bois de Vincennes, pavilions to French colonies in Asia, Africa, and Polynesia were raised, the most impressive ones to the colonies to which France was most strongly committed: Morocco, Algeria, French West Africa, and Indochina, with a full-scale reproduction of the vast Cambodian temple of Angkor Vat. The other colonial powers were present, as well: Italy, Portugal, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, and the United States. Two miniature railways conducted visitors around the exhibition, and at its eastern extremity there was a new kind of zoological park, one in which the animals, separated from the spectators by invisible ditches, could be viewed in reconstructions of their natural habitats, or what were supposed to be their natural habitats: Lions roared not from a savannah but from a rocky eminence, to the delight of the crowds (perhaps the lions’ feet hurt). Something on the order of 300,000 tickets were sold in the first seven months of the exhibition. The exhibition’s one permanent structure, the Musée Permanent des Colonies, as it was then called, thus distinguishing it from the temporary pavilions of the Colonial Exhibition, was designed by celebrated architect Albert Laprade and is still considered a landmark of modern French architecture, especially for its revolutionary technique d’ éclairage zénithale, lighting the space from above, instead of through windows. After the exhibition closed it was simply the Musée des Colonies. That name would eventually be changed, in deference to the inhabitants of those colonies, who had been accorded limited French citizenship in 1946, to the Musée de la France d’Outre-Mer, “Museum of Overseas France,” in keeping with the official alteration in that year of the name of the ministry in charge of the colonies. The colonies were no longer colonies—and this was especially true of Algeria—but “Overseas France.”

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The Musée des Colonies is decorated on the exterior by an immense, allegorical bas-relief by Alfred Janniot and assistants, depicting spectacular scenes from the French colonies throughout the world—most famously, a hippopotamus hunt. It covers the entire façade and wraps around some distance onto the sides of the building. At about 1,000 meters square, it is, I believe, the largest bas-relief in existence, a gigantic fresco in stone, as it has been called. The interior of Laprade’s museum is finished entirely in colonial materials, design, and décor, including rhinoceros-tusk door handles, gleaming tropical woods such as teak, and floor tiles of African and Arabic design. To bring in the light from above, the grand ceremonial hall, the Salle des Fêtes, is crowned by a gorgeous pagoda-like lunette with a blue wave pattern, providing layers of indirect light that illuminate the hall evenly and without glare. The decoration of the walls bathed in this light are the original occasion for this essay: a cycle of allegorical paintings by Pierre Ducos de la Haille and his students from the Ecole des Beaux Arts in the outmoded but demanding and resilient medium of true fresco, a technique, which by that date had been all but lost, for painting on wet plaster applied to the wall. The frescoes, usually referred to as “colonial allegories,” were executed between 1929 and 1931 and are on the subject of France in her relations with the continents of the globe: Europe, Asia, Africa, Polynesia, and America.4 The questions that first prompted me to write about the frescoes, which I had referred to but not seen when I wrote Allegory and Violence, were simple but, to me, intriguing. How is a highly traditional, originally medieval mode of expression, allegory, put into the service of the ideology of global, colonial power in the modern age? What is at work in the allegorical representation of the bodies of colonial subjects? A short time after these frescoes were made, from 1933 to 1939, Walter Benjamin was in Paris working in the Bibliothèque Nationale on the Arcades Project and arguing—showing would perhaps be the better word—that the sumptuous, glassed-in arcades of nineteenth-century Paris (many of which have today been restored), with their diminutive, elegant shops, are modern versions of older allegorical forms of expression. In the Paris arcades, the luxury commodity replaces the allegorical sign. It was Benjamin’s insight that the overdetermined character of the sign in medieval and Renaissance allegory (the sign means what it says, but it also means something more, something mysterious that participates in the system as a whole) bears a striking resemblance to Marx’s famous analysis in Capital of the fetish of the commodity. Benjamin took

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this similarity to be more than accidental: It was historical. The ideology of princely power in Renaissance allegory is given a total form in gigantic, allegorical works such as Dürer’s Triumph of the Emperor Maximilian or Giulio Romano’s Palazzo Te or Spenser’s Faerie Queene. In modern, capitalist societies, however, ideology and capital power become entirely blended in the presentation of commodities in circumstances like those of the Paris arcades, more broadly, in what we call advertising. Benjamin’s startling insight was that modern, commodity culture does not need to produce allegories in the old way, at vast expense and for a privileged few, because allegory has become incorporated in the total, economic structure of capitalist, commodity culture. Observing and buying luxury commodities in the Paris arcades afforded a sacramental experience of entering into a larger system of rich and mysterious meaning. In the democratizing of the experience of allegory, coveting replaces reading and purchasing replaces interpretation. Seen in this light, the colonial allegories of Pierre Ducos de la Haille were long out of date, even as they seemed to speak to France’s high destiny as an economic, colonial power. But one striking thing about the allegorical character of the commodity culture of which Benjamin speaks is its almost total occlusion of the body. In the colonial allegories, by contrast—and I refer to Janniot’s great bas-relief as well as to Ducos de la Haille’s frescoes— the body is spectacularly on view. On this issue of the spectacle of the body, it is noteworthy that actual people, not just representations of them, were also on display for the crowds at the Colonial Exhibition, in cultural dioramas like those that appeared in earlier exhibitions in Paris and London (one of which inspired W. S. Gilbert to write The Mikado), dioramas that were not so different from the Paris arcades. There were even preparations for a group of so-called “cannibals”— anthropophages—to be viewed in the zoological park, near the roaring lions. But at the last moment these unfortunate people, who had been transported to Paris from the South Pacific under shockingly false pretenses, were excluded from the Colonial Exhibition as inconsistent with its higher view of humanity. Unaware of these expectations, and lacking any experience with anthropoghagy, unless the Roman Catholic mass may be counted (a great attraction for them was that they would be allowed to worship at the cathedral of Notre Dame, of which they had heard so much at school), they expected to perform their traditional dances a few times daily and practiced them for months on the long voyage to Marseilles. They were promised warm clothing for the rest of the time, suitable for going around Paris and

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spending the pay they were also promised. They were instead put on display in the Bois de Boulogne, where in cold, sometimes freezing weather, wearing only their traditional clothes, they were forced to perform all day long as subhuman savages, roaring and tearing at joints of raw meat. Some were shipped off to zoos in Germany, to replace crocodiles that had died in transit from Egypt. But that is another story, a good one.5 Suffice it to say that the public display of exotic peoples in their cultural environments, weaving baskets and fashioning weapons, holding ceremonies, and so on, goes back to the mid-nineteenth century in Paris, when anthropology was accorded recognition as a science and public education in this new science became the justification for what degenerated, in the Bois de Boulogne’s Jardin d’Acclimatation, into something like circus—bad circus. When you come up out of the Porte Dorée métro station today you see the first of two monuments that remain from the Colonial Exhibition: an impressive, gold statue on a marble plinth, the personification of “France Colonizing”—la France Colonisatrice. It is situated on a large traffic island at the entrance to the Bois de Vincennes. From under the plinth, which bears the ship-symbol of Paris, a stream rushes forth to flow over a series of marble cascades and pools lined by palm trees (a surprising sight, in Paris), signifying the benefits of French culture flowing out to her colonies on the oceans of the world. The statue itself is fashioned after the goddess Athena, complete with helm, shield, and serpent. She supports on one extended palm a small, winged daemon, or “genius of plenty,” who in turn holds a cornucopia. The allegorical message is expressed in iconographical language as traditional as that of Georges Recipon’s chariots on the Grand Palais: La France Colonisatrice gathers material goods to herself from the whole world but returns benefits in greater abundance. The golden statue used to stand on the steps of the other monument of the Colonial Exhibition, which is a little further on, to the left, just inside the Parc de Vincennes and set back a little from the Avenue Daumesnil: the Colonial Museum itself, “the summit of colonial art,” as Dominique Jarrassé has described it.6 From photographs, one can see why the statue was moved: Its classical style is inconsistent with wilder and more exotic imagery of the museum, especially of the exterior. A broad staircase leads up to a portico, which extends the full length of the building, supported by slender, segmented columns that suggest the boles of palm trees, behind which, covering the façade and, as I mentioned, wrapping around

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onto the sides, is Janniot’s bas-relief representing France and her colonies throughout the world, but representing them in terms of the actual, raw materials they supplied to the metropolitan center. Around the main entry a personified France and her port cities appear, traditionally draped, as in medieval allegory. But they are flanked by gigantic elephants to the right (far exceeding life size) and, to the left, the hippopotamus hunt I have mentioned, the vast, yawning animals pursued at a run by magnificent black Africans with spears, while still more magnificent black African women are engaged in various laborious tasks which put them in interesting postures. (Photographs show that Janniot worked with live naked models at the site, shielded from view by canvas curtains.) Such scenes are brilliantly juxtaposed to a background that is a map of the world, showing the French colonies and naming the raw materials (the words are actually carved in the stone) those colonies supplied: gold and silver, of course, and ivory, of course, but also tin, lead, iron, manganese, coal, phosphates, graphite, leather, rubber, wood, cereals, silk, fruits, sugar cane, and cocoa. “While the public expected dreamlike exoticism,” Jarrassé writes, “it was necessary also to show it an empire that works, that produces goods, and that provides a profit on France’s investment . . . but there must be no economic benefit to France without something returned, without a social gain for the colonized and, at the same time, a recognition of the indigenous culture of the colonized.”7 That second gain—recognition of the indigenous cultures—was expressed in the pavilions and the colonial museum itself, as something picturesque, exotic, teratological, and allegorical. But for the general public, and for most of the politicians of the Third Republic, the first gain was far more important. It was the shining forth (rayonnement) to the “inferior” peoples of the globe—so they were called in contemporary newspaper accounts—of European, enlightenment culture. The idea goes back to one of the great liberal figures of the Third Republic, Jules Ferry, who in an 1885 speech to the National Assembly promoted colonialism in Tunisia, Madagascar, the Congo, and Tonkin as a moral project: “The superior races have the duty to civilize the inferior races.”8 While Alfred Janniot’s bas-relief for the Musée des Colonies emphasized the material benefits France’s colonies brought her, the colonial frescoes in the Great Hall were to emphasize the spiritual and cultural benefits France brought to her colonies, a structure familiar from the palaces, chateaus, and enclosed gardens of medieval French allegory, or the houses and castles of Spenser’s Faerie Queene. The principle is a classically allegorical one. As

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with the Sileni mentioned by Alcibiades in the Symposium and explicated by Erasmus, an allegory is like an ugly statue of the satyr Silenus, which when opened reveals a beautiful god within. There is meant to be a sharp contrast in sense, almost a reversal, between exoteric display and esoteric disclosure, between what anyone may observe on the façade of this building without and what the adept will see on the interior walls, in the protected spaces of the building’s penetralia. We shall see that the counterparts in Pierre Ducos de la Haille’s frescoes to those raw materials on Janniot’s bas-relief are the sails of the French trading-ships, the caravelles, bringing the light of French civilization to every corner of the globe. Another feature typical of allegory appears on the west exterior wall of the museum, around to the left as one faces the building, where the basrelief ends. It is a roll of 160 names of the heroes of the “colonial epic”— l’ épopée coloniale—who are thanked in language that recalls the inscription over the Pantheon, where France’s greatest heroes rest, making this building a sort of colonial pantheon: “A thankful France to her sons, who have extended the empire of her genius and made her name to be adored beyond the seas” [“A ses fils qui ont étendu l’empire de son génie et fait aimer son nom au délà des mers, la France reconnaissante”]. Many such lists appear in allegorical works, for example, in the dungeon of the House of Pride in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, which contains all the famous conquerors of history, “Like carkases of beasts in butchers stall”: All these together in one heape were throwne, Like carkases of beasts in butcher’s stall. And in another corner wide were strowne The antique ruines of the Romaines fall: Great Romulus the Grandsyre of them all, Proud Tarquin, and too lordly Lentulus, Stout Scipio, and the stubborne Hanniball, Ambitious Sylla, and sterne Marius, High Caesar, great Pompey, and fierce Antonius. (The Faerie Queene I. v. 49)

One is startled to see that this list of heroes from this épopée coloniale begins with Godefroy de Bouillon, 1058–1100, the leader of the first crusade, and that it contains Saint Louis, that addict of crusading, as well. Names

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more familiar to France’s colonies follow, among them Cartier, Champlain, Richelieu, Colbert (for the reorganization of the navy under Louis XIV), Talon, Frontenac, Montcalm, de la Vérendreye, Tallyrand, and on to the modern generals, explorers, scientists, colonial administrators, ethnographers, doctors and engineers, including, of course, Ferdinand de Lesseps, for the “piercing” of the Suez canal. There is one woman, Anna Marie Javoukey, 1779–1851, teacher and renderer of unspecified “assistance” to the colonies. I will confess to being thrilled at this roll call of famous and not-so-famous names going down the centuries from the Middle Ages to modern times, punctuated throughout with such evocative place names: Brazzaville, Djibouti, Western Sahara, the kingdom of Tonkin, Mauritius, Niger, Dahomey, Tunesia, Melanesia, Tombouctou in the Sudan. With the intense traffic at one’s back, peering through an ugly fence and through litter entangled in the ragged tree branches, one can still experience the intoxication of the day, the feeling of being embarked on a high enterprise that began almost with the origin of France herself, leading humanity into the future. It feels as if the dream of globalization, of universal harmony amid the greatest possible diversity, has its origin here. The principal tableau of Pierre Ducos de la Haille’s frescoes in the Great Hall shows France, with a muscular Europe in a toga beside her, holding the dove of peace and receiving tribute from the continents of the globe in return for French enlightenment, French liberty, and French cultural forms. Asia and Africa ride toward France on their respective species of elephant while Polynesia and America are borne on fabulous sea horses with webbed front feet and serpentine tails, rearing from the waves. Polynesia is a voluptuous South Seas odalisque, reclining on her steed, her black curling tresses cascading about her. America’s hair is cut in a short, sensible bob, and she seems to head toward Polynesia instead of France, in a scene of inadvertent sexual threat, brandishing a skyscraper that rises from her lap. Ducos de la Haille was taken to task about that skyscraper, which seemed to suggest, among other things, that Manhattan is or ever was a colony of France. But the artist was immovable, and rightly so. France did have a remarkable—and comparatively bloodless—colonial history in North America, and Manhattan symbolizes the height of North American civilization. Manhattan is also the symbol of the future. The skyscraper articulates a secondary theme inherent to the tradition of allegories of the continents,

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especially that of Giambattista Tiepolo, in Würzburg: the temporal narrative of human progress from Earth-bound primitivism to the highest stage of civilization, which touches the sky with its buildings and, like the Eiffel Tower, sends electronic signals around the planet. On the other walls of the Salle des Fêtes are beautiful genre scenes, interspersed with personifications (Commerce, Arts and Industry, and so on), in which the exotic peoples of the French colonies in Indochina, Africa, and Polynesia receive the benefits of French culture and enlightenment. There are scenes of surveying in Southeast Asia, of medical science being imparted to the people of Polynesia, of archeologists at work, of Chinese laborers loading ships, and of religion being taught to black Africans by a missionary who frees them from their chains, a deft conflation of manumission from literal slavery and from the spiritual abjection of idolatry. The heroic representations of the virtues, interspersed throughout the scenes from the colonies, are there to show what makes the colonial project possible: Liberty, Justice, Labor, and Culture. Justice with her Herculean arms might have been better termed “Enforcement.” Following icono­ graphic tradition, she is blindfolded and holds a sword in one hand, although its point is planted in the earth, and she has no balances, which might have implied a judicious weighing in the balance of the claims of the colonial other. Instead, she grasps by the throat a huge python, the body of which arches over her shoulder and winds around her back to grasp the sword with its tail. The wisdom of the serpent urges restraint, but not a fair hearing. Behind her is a huge American buffalo; and behind it, filling the background as they come over the horizon on a limitless sea, are the billowing sails of the French caravelles. Only gradually does one notice that these beautiful sails are everywhere in the background, coming toward us from all directions on a continuous blue ocean encircling the pictorial space. Those sails on the ocean are the freest, the most delightful part of the design, promising release from the crowded jungles and docks of the colonial scenes into open spaces beyond. But the sails are all coming toward us, as if the open spaces that attract us were being folded into the colonial allegories from which we have been promised a temporary, aesthetic escape. Where do they come from? Obviously, from France. But I am unable to say how many times I had visited the Salle des Fêtes before I noticed that, in the principal tableau of France and the continents, the dove of peace that France holds is multiplied in the foliage above her into many doves and that these are implicitly transformed

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into the sailing ships on the ocean behind her. Thus, in Ducos de la Haille’s iconographical design, the dove that France holds in her hand as an offering of peace multiplies and metamorphoses into all the ships we see on the ocean that encircles the globe. I said that Ducos de la Haille’s genre scenes are beautiful, which they are. It is always a pleasure to watch others doing physical labor from which one is free. But those scenes are also disturbing because, in a mysterious sense, all the happy bodies we see feel as if they are imprisoned. Such representations of the body are often governed by what in Allegory and Violence I called capture, the principle underlying personification. Allegorical capture gives us the sense that a living body, such as that of Francesca da Rimini in Dante’s Inferno, has been confined to an alien structure of meaning, one in which the human person has been reduced to performing the function of a sign in a system of signs—or partly so. Dante’s genius as an allegorical poet is in his ability to have characters resisting their reduction and speaking against it, so that the reduction is never complete but is always a struggle. His characters are like caryatids that push upward against the immense weight of the meaning that is bearing down on them and of which they are the captive signifiers. But in its struggle to assert itself against an overbearing meaning, this humanity is thrown into sharper relief than it would be were it not under such hostile pressure. On the other hand, the meaning exerting this pressure is also thrown into relief because it is not static signification but meaning at work, meaning bearing down against a contrary force, which is human subversion. The violence is directed both ways, as in an agon, a contest, each contestant striving to master and transform the other. Although meaning in Dante’s Commedia is less readable than meaning is in the simpler kind of allegory that follows in the tradition of the Roman de la Rose, where characters bear their labels unresistingly, such meaning is deepened by the struggle to assert itself against a humanity that is other with respect to it, and that subverts it. The allegory shines because of this violence, not in despite of it. The analysis I have just given of the struggle in the allegorical personification between meaning and humanity is important for understanding the surging force of human and animal bodies in the colonial allegories of the Musée des Colonies. In the first place, the meaning of a body is the work it can do: loading ships, digging mines, bearing loads. In the second place, as we saw when we observed the similarity between the allegorical

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sign and the commodity, the meaning of a body is its contribution to the global system of the allegory in which material goods are exchanged for cultural forms—exchanged at a distance. The resistance against this meaning, pushing upward, as it were, is often the sexual allure of the bodies portrayed and the equally incidental allure of the exotic worlds in which those bodies live, apparently so joyously and freely. We see the athletic, working breasts and laboring torsos of dark-skinned people engaged in such energetic tasks as a hippopotamus hunt, or riding on elephants, or bearing goods in a procession, or, as I said, loading ships and digging mines. Anticipating the global tourism industry, and especially tourism of the kind described in Michel Houllebecq’s Platforme, we want to enter an exotic world of imaginary freedoms with the exotic bodies that live there. We do not want to bring them home with us as servants or to settle them in the suburbs of our cities. We want them to work where they are, fulfilling the colonial allegory while we stay at home to receive what they produce. But we also want to go where they are so they can put down their work for our sake, long enough to show us their world and themselves. I am not speaking just of what passes through the fantasies of the viewer of these allegories, although I am certainly speaking of that. I am also speaking of how the allegories are actually made and of what inspires the makers, as Dante was inspired by the story of Francesca da Rimini’s adultery, creating a character who is sexually attractive to us because she is to him. So it is with the illustrators, painters, and sculptors of the Colonial Exhibition. They have an allegorical task to fulfill, but they also want to make alluring art, and this allure, which draws on our proclivity to sexual fantasies and unproductive travel, is subversive of the global ideological scheme the colonial allegories were expected to promote. The formal opening of the Colonial Exhibition, performed by the president of France, Gaston Dommergue, took place on May 6, 1931, in the ceremonial hall of the Museum of the Colonies. The principal harangue was delivered by the director of the colonial exhibition, one of the great architects of France’s colonial adventure, Louis Hubert Gonsalve Lyautey, Maréchal de France, resplendent in full marshal’s uniform, complete with kepi, a visual reminder of what the exhibition was supposed to help the French forget: the generals of the Great War. Lyautey had served most of the war in Morocco, not on the Western Front, but he was minister of war in 1916–1917. To say the least, Lyautey was a complicated figure, a model, in part, for Proust’s

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homosexual reactionary, the baron de Charlus. Educated at the elite Ecole Polytechnique and the still more elite Ecole Militaire de Saint-Cyr, Lyautey was a military man, a Catholic conservative, and also, astonishingly for the time, a monarchist—convictions that gave him, as he recognized, a spontaneous sympathy with and understanding of the deeply religious and hierarchical character of Arab culture. But in contrast with his conservative tendencies, Lyautey was probably pro-Dreyfus, or he was at least contemptuous of the populist anti-Semitism whipped up by the anti-Dreyfusards, and he was certainly, as I said, homosexual and not especially secretive about it. In a still more striking departure from the attitudes of many of his class and convictions, Lyautey translated Hitler’s Mein Kampf so the French could see what the Führer had in store for them (Hitler tried to block its publication). Lyautey acquired deep knowledge and appreciation of the colonized cultures in which he served for most of his career, not only that of Moslem North Africa, in particular Morocco, where he was interred for a time, in Rabat, before being brought to the Invalides.9 But he was not lacking in ruthlessness either, as we shall see. Lyautey’s opening address at the Colonial Exhibition was the perfect expression of the dream of worldwide French empire. The purpose of the exhibition, he said, is to show “that there are for our civilization other fields of battle, that the nations of the twentieth century can now rival one another not in the quest for military domination but in the works of peace and of progress.”10 Another reason to hold the Colonial Exhibition in east Paris, a reason Lyautey acknowledged only in private, was that the working-class populace of east Paris was voting for the communists. (The communists and the surrealists nobly joined forces to mount a sparsely attended counterexhibition on the evils of colonialism.) The Colonial Exhibition would be a way of enlisting the working classes’ patriotic sympathy for the colonial project and their material interest in it. Lyautey had initially opposed the location of the Colonial Exhibition in east Paris for the reasons we have seen: East Paris is a place of no honor, and west Paris is where the Third Republic had held its great exhibitions of the past, leaving in their wake, so to speak, the Eiffel Tower and the palaces on the Champs-Elysées. But once the decision was taken for east Paris, Lyautey spoke of the project in a private letter with the enthusiasm of a civil engineer, which is what he was by training: “Is not the east of Paris a region of which it is commonly said that it is lost to communism? It may be worthwhile to cultivate our new, green shoots of colonialism [nos pousses coloniales] in the midst of this populist area . . .

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I rejoice, for my part, to behold this population and to enter into discussion with it [de voir cette population et de causer avec elle]. I am convinced that the exposition could be a great influence for social peace in this region of Paris.”11 Lyautey goes on in this letter to say that he is fired with the ambition to bring about this “social peace” by the “Haussmanization” of the area in a manner that would be “at once up-to-date and total,” treating the region as a “tabula rasa.”12 He had done so before with the Moroccan capital, Rabat, razing its labyrinthine Souk and laying the avenues out in the form of a modern French city. The term Haussmanization refers to the later nineteenth-­century transformation of the Paris of the Second Empire by Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann, who bulldozed the medieval buildings, narrow streets, and old parishes of the city to make room for the grand avenues that not only beautified Paris and let in the light but also made it possible for troops to be transported rapidly from one neighborhood to another and for artillery to have a clear field of fire. It was accomplished at enormous cost to the working classes, many of whom were forced out of the city to the east, where Lyautey now proposed to assist them by means of another displacement. As the reference to “social peace” makes clear, the authorities did not forget that public unrest and, occasionally, insurrection, come to Paris from the east. I said that the Colonial Exhibition was intended to assert a defining role for the Third Republic after the disaster of the Great War. But this role was not new. The achievements of the Third Republic as a colonial power over the nearly seventy years of its existence, in the exploration, conquest, and administration of very distant lands and peoples, were determined and impressive. It was not called “the conquering republic” for nothing. By the 1930s, to judge by the sheer extent of her territorial possessions, France had reached her apogee as a colonial power. Nothing seemed more certain than that she would go from strength to strength, consolidating her access to the raw materials and huge markets within her vast territories by conferring on the populations resident in those territories—populations outnumbering by many times that of France itself—the benefits of French law, language, and culture—and at length of limited French citizenship. Colonization would drive the transformation of France from what was still largely an agricultural society (a major reason for the military defeats she had suffered at Germany’s hands) into a modern, industrial economy operating on a global scale. Had she not already realized the dream of the Emperor Charles V—

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the Holy Roman Emperor during Spain’s conquest of Mexico and Peru—of commanding an empire on which the sun never set? It was to set sooner than anyone at the time could imagine. Within three decades, after another world war brought down the Third Republic and the long-drawn-out agonies of Indochina and Algeria brought down the Fourth, the French dream of an empire lay in ruins. Colonialism was condemned by intellectuals on the political left, following Sartre, as a long series of rapacious thefts and crimes against humanity, which is to be expected in the early stages of global class struggle and the vindication of international communism, of which the Indochinese, Algerian, and Cuban revolutions were models. This was delusional, but not so delusional as the dream of the political right, the same one that animated the Colonial Exhibition: that it would be possible to make loyal French subjects out of colonial subjects, despite the impossibility of ever giving them more than limited citizenship if France itself was to survive. As Raymond Aron saw, there could never be a France outre-mer, a France beyond the seas, of any size or significance. The independence of the former colonies was therefore both desirable and inevitable, though likely to be a catastrophe for them, as has proven to be true. When the dream of France beyond the seas lay in ruins, it left in its wake the intractable problems associated with the second and third generations of immigrants from the colonies, crowded into the desperate, periodically incendiary high-rise suburbs surrounding the cities: the bandes de misère, or “rings of misery,” as they are called. France beyond the seas had imploded. Almost half a century later, France’s colonial history is still a subject of bitter debate, and the social problems left behind by that history are greater now than they were immediately after the collapse. The mood in the banlieue is reflected in the words of the rapper, N.A.P.: “Écoute l’ histoire de Renoi, Rabza, qui ont grandi dans tes poubelles” (“Hear the story of Kalb [Black] and Bara [Arab], who grew up in your garbage cans”).13 After the collapse of the ideology of the colonial project, the history of the Colonial Museum, the building generally referred to now as the Palais de la Porte Dorée, is interesting and instructive to follow. In 1960, at the beginning of the Fifth Republic, and at the instigation of President de Gaulle’s minister of culture, André Malraux, the Colonial Museum became the Musée Nationale des Arts d’Afrique et d’ Océanie. Making a trenchant, if not easily tenable distinction, Malraux took the African and Oceanic collections from the Louvre and sent those of chiefly ethnographic interest to the

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Musée de l’Homme at the Trocadéro, while selecting for the new museum works that merited analysis in the aesthetic language of abstract forms and plastic values and that seemed, in the light of such analysis, to rise above the primitive circumstances of their production to achieve universal value. With Algerian independence, the collapse of the Fourth Republic, and the return of General de Gaulle, a museum of the colonies hardly went with the spirit of the times. But the material loss of France’s colonial possessions could now be reconceptualized as an aesthetic gain for the cultural heritage of mankind. Visitors to the museum were instructed in the circumstances of the works’ origins in Polynesia and Africa, as they were also in the history of French colonialism, which was still presented in a positive light. They were also informed of the influence of these works on the great modern artists, from Gauguin to Giacometti and Picasso.14 As was to be expected, the museum fell into greater obscurity and disapproval after 1968. But its end was assured only later, when a fever pitch of indignation was reached on March 15, 1990, in a manifesto published in the left-wing newspaper Libération, signed by nearly fifty eminent artists, authors, and anthropologists, including Michel Leiris, Maurice Blanchot, Yves Bonnefoy, Hélène Cixous, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jean-François Lyotard, Philippe Lacou-Labarthe, and Jean-Pierre Vernant, attacking the Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens, as it was also called, for sequestering the so-called primitive arts in east Paris—a place, as we have seen, of no honor—and urging their return to the Louvre.15 The author of this document was the fascinating, shadowy figure of the late Jacques Kerchache (d. 2001), a great collector and champion of “primitive” or “First Peoples’” arts (the first term is assumed to be derogatory; the second is almost meaningless). He had been jailed in Africa for attempting to export art illegally, and that was just one of the swashbuckling adventures he made no attempt to conceal: On the contrary, he gloried in what was intended to be an unflattering characterization of him as “the French Indiana Jones.” He was a personal friend of the French president, Jacques Chirac, in whom he found a fellow enthusiast for primitive arts, and he used his influence with the president to discredit the ethnologists at the Musée de l’Homme, whose scholarly concerns—with provenance, culture, ritual context, and the like, and of course publication—he regarded as a distractions from the pure aesthetic values embodied in the masterpieces of primitive art.16 This is the man who was the animating force of a new museum of primitive arts to replace both the Musée de l’Homme and the Musée des Arts Africains et

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Océaniens: the Musée du Quai Branly, the theater of which is devoted to his name. Kerchache was the purest expression of André Malraux’s noble intention to treat at least some of the religious artifacts of Africa and Oceania as being as worthy of veneration as the masterpieces of European art. He was also the purest expression of the confusions into which an unhistorical, decontextualized aestheticism can lead. For example, one of the more interesting tendencies of those in the debate who favor the aesthetic independence of the works of art from their cultural and ritual contexts is to transfer human qualities and rights from the makers of the works of art to the works of art themselves and to become indignant on behalf of those works. These great masterpieces have been subjected, because of racist aggression against them, to an humiliating displacement from the Louvre, their rightful home, to the nowhereland of east Paris. I do not exclude myself from those who take very great pleasure in contemplating these works aesthetically—as no doubt some ethnographers do. But it is important to be aware of the danger of attributing to the works human qualities—and, more to the point, human rights—that allow those works to be substituted symbolically for real people. The height of absurdity is reached when the manifesto in Libération proclaims, “Masterpieces throughout the world are free and equal.” We saw that in 1930, at the colonial exhibition, actual persons were being presented allegorically, as works of art. Now, in 1990, the rights of persons were being accorded to works of art: Masterpieces are born free and equal. Five years later, on November 14, 1995, President Chirac, standing under the Louvre pyramid, would announce the return to the Louvre, in the Pavillion des Sessions, of a selection of 100 especially magnificent works of primitive art—in the literature the word primitive is both condemned and employed. The Pavillion des Sessions contains a truly magnificent display of primitive arts from around the world, although especially from Africa, curated entirely by Jacques Kerkache. Due largely to Kerkache’s influence, the Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens and the Musée de l’Homme at the Trocadéro were closed (in the latter case, not without a struggle) and a new museum planned in which the works could be displayed in the spirit of the exhibition at the Pavillion des Sessions. The Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens closed officially in 2003. The works of African and Oceanic art were removed to a “worksite” or chantier du musée underground in the thirteenth arrondissement, near the ­Bibliothèque

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Nationale, for elaborate restoration and cataloguing and in preparation for their transfer to a new museum, the existence of which I first learned in the winter of 2004, during a riverside walk on a winter night in west Paris on the Quai Branly. Meditating at the time on Pierre Ducos de la Haille’s frescoes, and only vaguely wondering what became of the works of African and Oceanic art that used to be in the same building, I was startled to come on a large work site with signs advertising a museum of primitive arts, legible in the lights blinking overhead from the Eiffel Tower. But the building that housed the Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens remained open, under the name the Palais de la Porte Dorée or, more simply, Aquarium, for that is what it also was from the beginning, on its lower level, where fish species from the colonies were displayed. The association of the Palais with France’s colonial past continues to make it a political football. During France’s intense bid for the Olympics, the Great Hall held displays celebrating French athletes—many of whom are descended from former colonials, a point not missed in the displays—and there were plans, since shelved, for an elite sports facility to be built in the Bois de Vincennes. To honor Albert Laprade’s innovations, the Palais was briefly destined to be a museum of modern architecture—long enough for the books to be brought into the bookstore and then carted away. In January 2007, after an elaborate architectural redesign of the interior (not all of it happy), the Palais opened the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration, a project Jacques Chirac had envisaged since his reelection in 2002 and which he announced in 2004. Not only do the exhibits in the Cité de l’Immigration celebrate the contributions of immigrants to French culture: They practically assert that immigrants—very, very broadly defined for the purpose—are the creators of French culture in its totality. The model of rayonnement in the frescoes in the Great Hall below the Cité de l’Immigration has been reversed: France is now a destination for oppressed peoples around the world (none of whom have been oppressed by the French, of course), who bring cultural enlightenment with them. Even that great definer and utterly ruthless savior of Renaissance France, Catherine de’ Medici, was an immigrant, after all. While it is true that these very favorable representations of France’s treatment of foreigners do not forget what the Vichy government—and the French who collaborated with it—did to the Jews in World War II, it is as if the dark side of French colonialism never occurred, an astonishing omission in that place. In this respect, for all its political correctness, or, I suppose, because of it, the Cité de l’Immigration is as ideologically blind as the Colonial

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Exhibition itself. As a cultural institution it remains a political statement to a degree that is unusual even in France. It is no doubt partly for this reason that the future of the Cité de l’Immigration is most uncertain under President Sarkozy, who has rather different ideas about the contribution of immigrants to French culture. There is then another story to be told about the works of African and Oceanic art that were removed from the Musée des Arts Africains et ­Océaniens and from the Musée de l’Homme for eventual inclusion—downstream—in the new museum, which opened in June 2006. In the manner of French presidents, the new museum is Jacques Chirac’s monument to his presidency, as the Pompidou Center is to Georges Pompidou and the National Library to François Mittérand. This is the sumptuous and prudently named Musée du Quai Branly (not a word about “primitivism” or “First Peoples”), an extraordinary building designed by France’s most famous architect, Jean Nouvel, whose other great work along the Seine is the Institut du Monde Arabe. The Musée du Quai Branly is no less an ideological statement than was the Musée des Colonies, even if the passage of time has yet fully to unveil the extent to which this is so. But here, at the end of this story, as a way of rounding it off, we may note the symbolic location of the Musée du Quai Branly far downstream from the Bois de Vincennes, in west Paris, under the Eiffel Tower, where, as we saw at the outset, luxury and official display are at home. Notes 1.  Thirza Vallois, Around and about Paris, 2nd ed. vol. 2 (London: Iliad, 1998), p. 178. I am more indebted to Vallois’s superb, three-volume walking guide to Paris (1995–1998) than this one reference indicates. I suspect that about threequarters of the factual information in this essay about Paris and its history comes either from Vallois or from following up on things seen during the countless walks I took with her volumes in hand. Other information about Paris comes from the most recent edition of the Guide Bleu de Paris, the Bibliothèque Nationale, and the Bibliothèque de la Ville de Paris. Except for the works cited below, a great deal of information about the museums discussed in this essay and the public debates swirling around them come from sources too numerous too document or even, admittedly, after five years of immersion in the subject, to recall. These sources include newspaper articles; public notices on the history of Paris; television programs on the French cultural channel, Arté; websites, including that of the new Musée du Quai Branly, before and after its opening; documents such as the news bulletin of the twelfth arrondissement; posters and stamps seen in bookstores, especially

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L’Harmattan, on Boulevard Saint Germain; old maps in the Louvre; official information and notices at the museums themselves; and numerous documents and objects, including a model of the entire Colonial Exhibition, at the Palais de la Porte Dorée, where I benefited from the many courtesies of the staff. I express my thanks to them here. The occasion of this essay was a single reference to the Musée des Colonies in my Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 117, which Brenda Machosky urged me to follow up for a lecture at the conference on which the present volume is based. I thank Professor Machosky for her patience with the many evolutions of this essay since it was originally given as a lecture. Special thanks are due to my learned friend, Dr. Uta Kriesten, a proud resident of the twelfth arrondissement, who cheerfully fulfilled many requests to verify information and in the course of doing so found more. I wish also to thank Penelope Fletcher-Lemasson, at whose bookstore, The Red Wheelbarrow, on Rue Saint Paul, I found Thirza Vallois’s volumes and where I also had invaluable conversations on the subject of this essay with the many foreign and French Paris aficionados who find their way daily to the Red Wheelbarrow Bookstore. 2.  The arrondissements are the administrative regions of Paris that spiral outward from the center, the Isle de la Cité. A faubourg, or “false town,” is the old word for a suburb, an area outside the old city walls. On old maps the large faubourgs enclosing Paris on the east and west respectively are the Faubourg Saint Antoine and the Faubourg Saint Honoré. The modern word for a suburb is banlieue, an administrative region having the right of ban or proclamation. 3.  The Faerie Queene V.i.54 4.  Catherine Bouché, “Allégories Coloniales,” L’Objet d’Art (April 1988): 88–97. 5.  The authoritative historical account is by the historian Joël Dauphiné, Canaques de la Nouvelle-Calédonie à Paris en 1931: De la Case au Zoo (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998). An entertaining, though historically inaccurate, novel about this episode is Didier Daeninckx’s Cannibale (Lagreasse: Verdier, 1996). In this softened and almost charming account, the Kanak “cannibals” are lodged, as promised, on the grounds of the Colonial Exposition and perform there. But they are more or less imprisoned. A couple of them escape into Paris and have fish-outof-water adventures, which turn darker when the girlfriend of one is among those who are transported to Germany. 6.  “Un Programme Idéologique et Didactique,” in Germaine Viatte and Dominique François, Le Palais des Colonies: Histoire du Musée des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2002), pp. 87–88. 7.  Ibid., p. 87. 8.  Cited in Le Monde, Saturday, January 21, 2006, “Dossier” vii. This is an eight-page insert on France’s colonial history and on what is still a very heated debate over it. 9.  See the article on Lyautey in the French Wikipedia.

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10.  Quoted in Germaine Viatte and Dominique François, Le Palais des Colonies: Histoire du Musée des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie (Paris: Réunion des Musés Nationaux, 2002), p. 24. 11.  Ibid., p. 27. 12.  Ibid., p. 28. 13.  From the song, “Si loin, si proche,” on the album, La Fin du monde, High Skills/B.M.G, 1998. In the argot code-language, Verlans (i.e., envers, backward), renoi and rabza are, respectively, Noir (Black) and Arabe. 14.  Jobic Lemasson, personal communication. 15.  Jacques Kerchache, Pour que les Chefs d’Oeuvre du Monde Entier Naissent Libre et Egaux. Reproduced on the website for the Musée du Quai Branly ­(quaibranly.fr/kerchache). 16.  See Bernard Dupaigne, Le Scandale des arts premiers: La Véritable Histoire du Musée du Quai Branly (Paris: Mille et Une Nuits, 1986). Dupaigne was director of the laboratory of ethnology at the Musée de l’Homme from 1991 to 1998, and he is the author of numerous works on Afghanistan and central Asian nomads. This fascinating polemic is written in a tone of cold outrage, but its account of events by an insider is scrupulously and extensively documented—it is far and away the best documentary source for anyone studying the evolution of the Musée du Quai Branly—and its portrait of Jacques Kerchache, the man who calumniated him and his colleagues, and, as he reports, destroyed the Musée de l’Homme, is surprisingly sympathetic in its portrait of a man he clearly regards as a sociopath. For an English account of these events, see Sally Price, Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quai Branly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

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Monuments and Space as Allegory Town Planning Proposals in Eighteenth-Century Paris richard wittman

1 Examples of allegory in the architecture of the premodern period are abundant. From antiquity through the Renaissance and Baroque periods, architecture was understood as a practice of symbolic representation. Its key forms all had multiple meanings. The central element of the classical system, the column, carried with it the idea of a tree. This enabled temples to be experienced as an allegory of the sacred groves where the gods had once been worshipped. Columns were also identified with the human body; thus the many medieval church choirs that were supported on two rows of twelve columns were legible as allegories of the Church, supported by the twelve apostles with twelve prophets behind them. The different orders of columns—Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite—not only symbolized different human types but also carried specific associations that could open up allegorical meanings in the architectural spaces they articulated. To take an example at random, all but four of the interior columns at the Lateran baptistery in Rome are Corinthian, while the other four, which

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frame the entry and exit, are Composite. The Composite order, invented in ancient Rome, was explicitly associated with victory; the most famous examples appear on the triumphal Arch of Titus in Rome. Their use here effectively transformed the ceremony of baptism into an allegory of one’s triumphal entry, first, into the Church (with the church here acting as a symbol of the Church), and thence a second triumphal entry into paradise.1 One could multiply such examples ad infinitum. To speak of allegory in the public architecture of the French Enlightenment, however, is a more surprising prospect. Most architects and theorists during this period were striving desperately for clarity and even transpar­ency of meaning. Thanks in part to the press and the development of architectural criticism, architects were increasingly aware that they were addressing an unprecedentedly broad and heterogeneous public, one in which classical erudition was ever rarer.2 In such circumstances, the symbolic language of classical architecture often seemed irrelevant. In 1783 the playwright and journalist Louis Sebastien Mercier addressed the following questions to architects: “Why always columns in architecture? Why always the same entablature? Why always the same compositions eternally repeated? Those columns recall tree-trunks; excellent. That entablature recalls beams; wonderful. But I’m seeing it now for the thousandth time. Can’t you imagine something else?” He added that, nowadays, when a peasant visits the big city and passes by a recently constructed bourgeois house, he imagines that it’s a temple; before you know it he’s on one knee looking around the front door for the holy-water stoup.3 Eager to salvage architecture’s attenuated public vocation, theorists became preoccupied with questions of architectural expression. The concept of “character” came to the fore: How could a building signal its purpose and nature in a legible fashion that transcended the vagaries of culture and education within the public? In the latter part of the century, it was Edmund Burke’s analyses of the psychological effects produced by different perceived phenomena that most piqued the interest of architects, who began to dream of an irresistibly expressive architecture based on contrasts of light and shade, terrifying size, pure geometries, and so forth. What possible place could allegory—a rhetoric of concealed meaning— have in architecture at a time like this? The development of architectural criticism had accelerated in France after about 1740, as pamphlets and articles in the periodical press introduced an expanding reading public to various kinds of occasional writing on architecture and the city. Much has been said in recent years about the ways

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in which art criticism, theater criticism, music criticism, and literary criticism were used during the eighteenth century as vehicles for thinly veiled political commentaries that would have been illegal on their own terms. Criticism associated with the biannual Salon exhibition of paintings by members of the Royal Academy is one of the best-known examples of this. Central to the discourse of Salon criticism was the notion of the Academy as a mirror of the feudal politics of monopoly, exclusion, and privilege. This enabled radical art critics to attack the degeneracy of academic art as a way of proclaiming the corruption of the aristocratic regime. The frequent use of erudite classical allegories in academic history paintings was a major target, attacked by critics as a mirror of the ruling elite’s effeteness, penchant for dissimulation, and contempt for the ordinary person.4 The irony, of course, is that the very mode of criticism being used here was itself allegorical: For, in these sorts of texts, the academy stood for feudalism, the artists stood for the apparatchiks who served the regime, the exhibition itself stood for the public domain, the Salon public stood for the larger public, and finally the art critic stood for the patriotic citizen who exposed the moral bankruptcy of the regime to his or her fellow citizens.5 One obvious benefit of submerging all this allegorically, in what were ostensibly works of art criticism, was that it made censorship difficult. The regime was very sensitive to charges of despotism and did what it could to preempt them by fostering a lively, if tightly policed, cultural life. Tightening the controls on something as seemingly harmless as art criticism would have exposed the artificiality of that cultural life—as the regime usually discovered whenever it did try to censor art criticism.6 A similarly allegorical framework for criticism existed in the domain of architecture and town planning as well. The critic La Font de Saint-Yenne provides us with a superb example in his 1747 discussion of the new facade of the parish church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris (Figure 6.1).7 La Font was normally a partisan of muscular classicism, and one would have expected him to appreciate this powerful façade; but instead he attacked it, and with startling venom. He expressed satisfaction that it was partly concealed from view by a preexisting building; he scathingly ridiculed the huge expense that had been lavished on it; he decried the fact that “an infinity” of excellent French architects had been bypassed for its design, in favor of a foreigner—the Italian Servandoni—who, La Font hissed, was not even an architect but a mere stage-set decorator (which was true). He concluded: “Who will be able to believe their eyes when they see the license & false

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Figure 6.1.  Servandoni’s facade for Saint-Sulpice in Paris. Bibliothèque ­Nationale de France.

Ultramontane taste triumphing so pompously throughout this Edifice?” This was very politically loaded language: By 1747 the word ultramontane referred unmistakably to those forces within the upper clergy and aristocracy who approved of King Louis XV’s attempts to enforce the papal bull

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Unigenitus in France.8 This notorious bull excluded from communion and Christian burial all persons unable to prove themselves free of the taint of Jansenist theological leanings. The Jansenist heresy was popular in Paris and in other parts of France, and the Paris Parlement—which contained many influential Jansenists—aggressively took up the Jansenist cause against the crown. The long series of crises this caused together constitute the central political conflict of the French eighteenth century. This was in part because the Parlement managed to frame the conflict as a constitutional issue: Did the king owe his power to God alone, and was he thus empowered to act on the pope’s orders, very much against the public will? Or was royal authority conditional, and did the nation, through Parlement, have a right to steer and restrain the crown? So why did La Font de Saint-Yenne level a charge of false ultramontane license and theatricality at this specific façade? Because the parish and seminary of Saint-Sulpice was a principal stronghold of the anti-Jansenist position in the French capital—and because La Font himself was a pious and politicized Jansenist. The priest who had sponsored the work at SaintSulpice was a rabid anti-Jansenist noted for his labors to purge his parish of the heresy. His brother was the powerful archbishop of Sens, who has been called by one recent historian “the chief scourge of Jansenists in the first half of the eighteenth century.”9 As for the charge of “theatricality,” this was common in Jansenist attacks on the Jesuits and on the aesthetics of the Roman Church generally. And so, with his use of the word ultramontane, La Font would immediately have evoked the whole Jansenist controversy to his readers, inviting them to see an allegorical dimension to his criticism of the façade. In this submerged narrative, the parish of Saint-Sulpice would represent the antiJansenist position; the construction of a theatrical façade at the center of Paris by an ultramontane architect would parallel the application of a papal bull to the edifice of French law; while the unjust neglect of good French architects would parallel the crown’s betrayal of the nation into the foreign hands of the pope. Another way that political content was introduced allegorically into architectural writing was in the form of proposals for urban monuments. These texts were typically pamphlets or articles in literary periodicals that suggested a project for Paris in which one or more monuments, streets, or plazas would occupy, destroy, or reframe significant sites or buildings or even establish meaningful dialogues between monuments. These proposals

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were published, with few exceptions, in the full knowledge that they would never be constructed; their purpose, rather, was entirely discursive. For instance, in January 1776, just three weeks after a fire had severely damaged the Palace of Justice in Paris, the architect Perrard de Montreuil published a proposal for its reconstruction.10 The palace was the courtroom complex where the Parlement of Paris met. They were the most important of the various Parlements of France, with whom, as noted, the crown had been involved in a long, hard struggle regarding whether the king’s authority was absolute or not. In 1771, that struggle had come to a head: Following the plans of his chief minister, Louis XV abolished the Parlements altogether. The move was deeply unpopular. The ousted parliamentarians launched a publicity offensive that accused the crown of despotism. The crown hired pens to respond, and before long an unprecedented battle to win over public opinion had erupted.11 In 1774, after more than two years of this, Louis XV died. The much milder Louis XVI assumed power and almost instantly caved in to pressure to reinstate the Parlements and to dismiss the ministers who had been responsible for their suppression. Spontaneous celebrations erupted in Paris and the provinces, with many revelers willfully portraying the event as a royal acknowledgment of the sovereignty of public opinion.12 It was at this point, right after the Paris Parlement had resumed its duties, that fire destroyed the Parlement’s quarters at the Palace of Justice. As its accompanying text made clear, Perrard de Montreuil’s project (Figure 6.2) was an allegorical commentary on these recent events. The text opened with a reference to the Palace that had burned—a vast, rambling warren of dead-end corridors and misshapen rooms that had accreted over several centuries. Perrard remarked how astonishing it was that, for so many centuries, those coming in search of justice had been confronted, on their arrival, with the image of a labyrinth. It was astonishing not only because it was inappropriate but because it so accurately reflected the character of the legal system that had grown up in France over the centuries. In explaining why even the repairable parts of this building ought to be demolished, Perrard declared: “Let us efface, by our writings, by our institutions, and by our monuments, the reigns of Louis IX, of François I, of Louis XIV, & of Louis XV.”13 So it wasn’t just a building that he dreamed of sweeping away; it was the entire heritage of those several kings who in succession had built the building. As for the new complex, Perrard explained that it would be clear and logical, rigorously symmetrical, and splendid in its architectural decor. The

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Figure 6.2.  Perrard de Montreuil’s plan for the reconstruction of the Palais de Justice (1776). Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris.

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Louis XVI statue at its center was to stand before the great central courtroom, which Perrard called the Temple of Justice and planned to outfit with a massive classical façade. The king would be shown gesturing toward these new buildings as he surrendered the book of laws to Themis, the goddess of justice, who would be smiling her approval at him. A bas-relief on the pedestal would show the king signing the recall of the Parlements while Minerva, goddess of wisdom, whispered in his ear. The statue would face to the west, looking through a screen of columns and across another court, through a widened Place Dauphine, and toward the older statue of King Henri IV standing on the Pont Neuf.14 Everything about this king was submissive: Having surrendered the book of the laws to the goddess of justice, he was just another supplicant at her temple. But the reference to Henri IV was key, for a popular cult had developed around Henri IV during this period. He was remembered as a benevolent and selfless king who had loved Paris, rebuilding it in the wake of the Wars of Religion, in contrast to his descendants, who had abandoned it for Versailles. On the death of the detested Louis XV, a wave of Henri IV nostalgia had overtaken Paris— ruff collars and balloon sleeves came briefly into fashion; on the day Louis XVI was crowned, someone placed a placard on Henri’s statue that said “Resurrexit.”15 The connection hinged on a parallel between Louis’s resolution of the Parlements crisis and Henri’s ending of the Wars of Religion. In sum, Perrard’s project was allegorical: The labyrinthine old building stood for the corrupt and oppressive heritage of the Old Regime; the act of destroying it signaled a desire to sweep away that heritage; the construction of a clearly organized, symmetrical new temple for justice pointed toward the inauguration of a more open, more rational, more equitable society governed by the rule of law; while the erection of a new royal image at the monument’s center expressed a longing that a new conception of kingship might emerge, one in which the king, under the watchful eye of his new model, Henri IV, submits to the law and to public opinion.

2 Is there anything more to be said about these allegories beyond the obvious point that they enabled their authors to publish on controversial political matters without being censored? There is, if one places them in the larger context of architecture’s changing and increasingly problematic place in the

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public sphere during the eighteenth century. The expansion of the architectural public during this period provoked much anxiety concerning the relevance of architecture as a public art. At the heart of these anxieties was an implicit sense that architecture, as the ultimate site-specific art form, had lost its purchase in a new kind of spatially exploded, nationally scaled public sphere. This was a public sphere that no longer referred primarily to the embodied experiences of communities dwelling in specific places but was constituted rather by the circulation of printed matter across great distances among anonymous strangers. The resort to allegory—to recasting the meaning of buildings and urban places in terms of hidden stories, skillfully told in print by the knowing critic—was in fact but one facet of the much broader compulsion during these years to translate the spatial fixity and implicit, poetic expressivity of architecture into the more explicit and more widely communicable format offered by print. The large-scale public discourse on architecture that began in the 1740s erupted after the young Louis XV had decided to take the reins of government personally, after two decades of rule by an unpopular prime minister, Cardinal Fleury. Under Fleury, the state had sponsored hardly any major public buildings in Paris. This neglect weighed heavily on patriots who had been raised on Latin classics and the glories of Rome, and it fed a creeping nostalgia for the grand projects of the early years of Louis XIV’s reign, before his move to Versailles. The other main legacy of Cardinal Fleury’s time in power was an increasingly politicized Parisian populace, the result mainly of his battles with Parlement over the Jansenist heresy. All of which meant that Louis XV’s decision to assume command of the government in 1743 immediately sparked intense maneuvering among various factions who hoped to advance their agendas in his government’s crucial first years. And it was in writing about architecture and especially town planning that several insurgent critics, nearly all of them pro-Parlement and pro-Jansenist, found an unexpectedly effective polemical instrument. Two images dominated the early years of debate, from about 1747 to 1755. The first was the east wing of the royal Louvre Palace. Like Paris itself, the Louvre had been largely abandoned by the monarchy when Louis XIV had moved the royal court to Versailles in the late seventeenth century. The most visible and potentially magnificent part of the palace, the Louvre colonnade, stood incomplete as an unroofed shell (Figure 6.3). The symbolism of this impending ruin fit neatly into the thematic of the crown–Parlement disputes: What could speak more clearly of the crown’s turn away from the

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Figure 6.3.  The Cour Carrée of the Louvre, as depicted in the Plan de Turgot of 1739. Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris.

nation than the abandonment of the royal palace in the principal city of the realm? Thus polemicists began representing the empty Louvre as a tragic image of royal desertion and neglect. The pro-Parlement critic Louis Petit de Bachaumont wrote and circulated a song, set to a popular tune, which told of a jolly family of commoners going down on a feast day to the Louvre to shout “Vive le roi!”—and wondering why the king won’t come to the window to acknowledge their cheers.16 Patriotic appeals for the restoration and completion of the palace soon began appearing in print, several of which expressed the hope that the monarch would then return there to dwell—in other words, that he would descend from the Apollonian fantasies of Versailles and return to governing as French kings once did, that is, in contact and cooperation with the nation (as represented by the Parlement). The second image dear to the architectural polemicists of the late 1740s was closely related to the first: It was that of the king himself, cast in bronze.

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In 1748 the municipal authorities in Paris had announced their intention to build a square in Paris centered on a statue of the king, though neither the design nor even the site were specified.17 Into that vacuum rushed dozens of proposals, composed by architects, critics, retired military men, men of letters, and more.18 In several of these, the sculpted image of the king became a pointed proxy for the missing royal presence. Visibility was stressed again and again: In one proposal, the royal statue was to stand exposed on a bridge at the center of the city, with streets radiating out all the way to the city walls so that the bronze king could be, as it were, visually present everywhere at once. And several writers slyly proposed placing the royal image at the restored Louvre palace itself.19 No text did more during these years to announce this transformation of the cityscape into a political allegory than a little book entitled L’Ombre du Grand Colbert, published in 1749 by the same La Font de Saint-Yenne who, two years earlier, had written about Saint-Sulpice.20 This text took the form of a dialogue among the royal palace of the Louvre, the city of Paris, and the spirit of Louis XIV’s great controller general, Jean-Baptiste Colbert. In La Font’s hands, these three characters became a family, transforming the plight of the city into a bourgeois family drama: The Louvre became an unjustly neglected son, the city of Paris became a long-suffering yet fiercely loyal mother, and Colbert, fondly remembered for his efforts to embellish Paris, became the dear departed family patriarch, back on a visit from the afterlife. The book opened with the Louvre plaintively asking his mother, Paris, why he had been so neglected and abused. Paris tries to reassure him, but before long she is pining for Colbert, who she knows would have made both her and her son into marvels of the universe had he only lived longer. Colbert’s ghost then appears from the underworld. He is greeted on bended knee. Colbert, however, is shocked by what he sees. To Paris he says, “Eh! who are you?” Paris responds, “O humiliating question!” and pours out her tale of woe and neglect. Colbert sputters in outrage and disbelief.21 He then goes to visit the Louvre, his son. Seeing the building largely abandoned, its most famous facades hidden by shacks and parasite buildings, he becomes apoplectic and flees back to the underworld, to “the eternal oblivion of the dishonor of my nation”—a moment captured in the vivid frontispiece that accompanied the second edition of the book (Figure 6.4). Alone again, the Louvre turns desperately to Paris, tells her that she is his only hope for redemption, and begs her to save him. Paris swears that she will do what she can and will not remain silent.22

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Figure 6.4.  The frontispiece of La Font de Saint-Yenne’s book, L’Ombre du Grand Colbert (1752). © cliché publié avec l’autorisation gracieuse de la Bibliothèque de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art, bibliothèque (collections Jacques Doucet).

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Jürgen Habermas has argued that the eighteenth-century public’s understanding of its use of reason in the political sphere grew out of the private experiences of the conjugal family’s intimate domestic sphere—the sphere of marriage and the family. This occurred, he argues, in the ostensibly apolitical literary public sphere, where novels and so forth provided an occasion for members of the book-reading public to reflect on matters common to their own scattered “subjectivities,” matters such as love, marriage, the family, and individual psychology. This offered a training ground for a critical public reflection, one that accustomed the bourgeoisie to trust the authority of its own judgment.23 In a later phase, explicit political content was increasingly brought to the attention of the bourgeois public via such dramas. Thus Voltaire, for instance, took to publishing sentimental, embellished accounts of contemporary court cases in which, typically, well-meaning, innocent, ordinary people were in danger of being victimized by powerful and privileged interests. Such works translated political abstractions into highly accessible personal dramas, in which any ordinary person could have a clear sense of what was at stake.24 This was the strategy underlying La Font’s dialogue as well, which also packaged political ideas in dramatic, familial terms that were more amusing than connoisseurial criticism and less foreboding than a political essay. But this only leaves a larger question hanging: Why the recourse to narrative in the first place? Granted, one cannot publish and circulate a building. But why not describe it or engrave it to bring it to the attention of the reading public? For that is the one thing that all these different architectural allegories and narrations do not do: They do not describe appearances. Somewhere in the background to La Font’s dialogue lies a text published in 1733, entitled Architecture des Églises Anciennes et Nouvelles, by an obscure writer named H. LeBlanc. In one part of this work, LeBlanc had compared the facades of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London, and Reims Cathedral in northern France. He had summarized his sense of how the façades related to the viewer by writing that “the façades of Saint Peter’s and Saint Paul’s say to your eyes: stay outside and admire us, rather than come in the Church. The Portal of Reims on the other hand says: come in the Church rather than admire me.”25 Here, even before La Font’s dialogue, we see architectural expression assimilated to a spoken narrative. A year later, in 1734, a reply to LeBlanc’s pamphlet was published in the court periodical, the Mercure de France, by the famous military engineer Amedée-François Frézier. Frézier—who was participating in this dis-

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embodied conversation from a military outpost on the German border— lamented that LeBlanc’s claims could be contested only in their own terms: “If one really must adopt the language of Fables in which inanimate objects can speak, here, according to me, is the invitation offered by Saint Peter’s.” And then he went on to provide an alternative narrative.26 What was the logic of this rhetorical move, in which words were used not to describe architectural form but as a substitute for architectural expression itself? Public architectural discourse in France had been occurring at a relatively modest level when Le Blanc and Frézier were conducting their dispute. But when La Font de Saint-Yenne was publishing, a decade and a half later, it had begun to erupt into a far broader phenomenon. More books, pamphlets, and periodical articles on architecture and the Paris cityscape were to appear between 1748 and 1755 than during the whole of the preceding half-century.27 But in a larger sense, these publications were but a facet of larger changes that had been occurring for 150 years, in government, religion, the economy, and cultural life; changes whose cumulative effect was to amalgamate what had long been a fragmented, heterogeneous, particularistic culture in France, leaving in its place a comparatively unified, normative, and national one. Administrative innovations from the royal center were replacing local power structures; the authority of the state was being imprinted on the natural order in the form of road networks, frontier fortresses, and canals; the Counter-Reformation Church was becoming far more vigilant toward unsanctioned religious practices on the local level; integrated commodity markets were developing inexorably, requiring of individuals an awareness of events well beyond the spatial orbit of their daily life; and, finally, traditional popular culture was gradually succumbing in the face of printed imagery and literature.28 By the eighteenth century, the cumulative power of these and other developments had begun to effect a broad epistemological revolution, whereby the thoughts and experiences by which people constituted their attachment to a social commonality were directed away from the life of some localized community, gathered physically in a specific place, and turned instead toward the life of a national culture that extended across the whole of French territory. I am not speaking here of the peasantry, of course, but the shift did become broad enough in the eighteenth century to finally have a decisive effect on politics and culture.29 This dispersed national community to which the imagination now turned did not dwell in a discrete place but rather assembled in the abstract, via discourse. Its concept of time was also new; for as Benedict Anderson has

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pointed out, printing helped engender within early mass reading publics a sense of simultaneity that was distinct from the lived time of embodied experience. The knowledge that thousands of others are reading the same thing as you, around the same time, helps generate the confidence of community even within what is in fact disaggregation, solitude, and anonymity. This was crucial in enabling people to think of these dispersed groups as communities.30 With these transformations in the normative view of space and community, the possible horizons for architectural experience were also disrupted. Space and community are, after all, very basic components of architectural experience. One can look at a photo or read a description of a distant building, but those are secondary levels of experience that refer to a primary level, which involves the presence of your body at the space of the building. As for community, or social experience more generally, architectural meaning was grounded for most of Western history in those webs of belief and expectation and prejudice that permit social groups to cohere. The classical tradition in French architectural theory used rhetorical terms like bienseance or convenance, which translate roughly to “decorum” or “propriety,” to articulate how a community drew forth meaning from the forms of a building; Without that community of reception, with its shared assumptions about the nature of the good, the forms could only remain mute.31 So what kind of architectural experience could be available to a community that gathered, as a community, not in a place, nor at a given moment, but rather in the abstract, via the perpetual, private consumption and production of printed matter and other cultural goods? Already in the early eighteenth century, some people seem to have intuited that, at the least, such a public would have different possibilities for architectural experience than people in traditional communities. An example is found in an early eighteenth-century manuscript by a writer called Jean Pagès.32 Pagès was an obscure amateur historian who had spent virtually his entire life in Amiens, in northern France. Pagès adored Amiens, and no part of it more than the magnificent Gothic cathedral that dominates the town. In his desire to understand that great building, Pagès had turned to the growing theoretical literature that had begun to appear with the foundation of the Royal Academy of Architecture in the late seventeenth century. In 1709, Pagès composed a dialogue in which two spectators, a local man from Amiens and a visitor from Paris, walked around and discussed the cathedral. Their conversation thematized the distinction between two ways of knowing the cathedral, one that stemmed from a local experience of the building as

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the memorial center of an ancient community and the other that stemmed from books in which buildings were understood as aesthetic objects. Not surprisingly, the text suggests that the insider’s experience is more intense. Pagès’s two characters repeatedly encounter aspects of the cathedral that lead the local man to thoughts about God, or about his community and what binds him to it, but that are experienced as curiosities or items of historical interest by the Parisian visitor. At the heart of Pagès’s parable were two modes of communication, architecture and printing. And if for Victor Hugo a century later these emblematized two different paradigms for intellectual production, one could argue that in Pagès’s text, architecture and printing were reflective of distinct spatial constructions of community: architecture, which reflects an embodied community that gathers in a real place; and printing, which assumes an anonymous community of disembodied discussion, gathered only in a virtual sense. Thus Pagès’s two characters, and the two modes they embody, point to the ways in which a dispersed public, by its very structure, opens gaps in the traditional economy of collective architectural experience, gaps that it tends to fill by the most effective means it possesses: verbal representations. For the dispersed public can only experience as a public that which is distrib­uted to its members individually; that which has been rendered clear enough, and durable enough, to retain some communicative efficacy uniquely as a copy or representation, lacking the aura of the original object. The model for such clear and durable distributability was, of course, the word. With this in mind, it becomes possible to understand the manner in which the word jumped from describing architectural form to being a substitute for architectural expression itself—as drama, as dialogue, as political allegory—as related to the pervasive anxiety that gripped contemporary architectural theorists, who yearned to imagine a new and more powerful basis for architecture communication. For the evidence was mounting during these years that the means of expression proper to architecture lacked purchase within the new kind of placeless public sphere constituted by print. Unlike the traditional spectator, whose experience is embedded in a specific social role tied to a physical place (like Pagès’s local man), the reader’s judgment occurs in the privacy of the mind, where one is alone and free amid an imagined community of other readers. Thus the reader is reputed to judge free of coercive, socially inflected communal frameworks— without which the mute forms of architecture could signify little more than themselves. Not for nothing did eighteenth-century French architectural

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thought culminate in a rash of bizarre experiments in expression, all in one way or another rooted in despair about the capacity of form to carry public meaning. There were logorrheic monuments slathered in text; there were gargantuan buildings that targeted the mechanics of perception through sublime effects; and there were utopian fantasies about “architecture parlante,” a “speaking architecture.”33 Projects like these were foreshadowed earlier in the century by the allegorical modes we have been considering, all of which represent different aspects of what I would pinpoint as the great architectural anxiety of the eighteenth century: namely, that the public domain had changed in some fundamental way that, quite literally, took the ground out from under architecture’s ancient vocation as the human artifact that most prestigiously and most legibly shaped the common spaces of social experience. Politically allegorical architecture criticism, in sum, was a way of making the social meanings of the built environment publicly available for a dispersed, anonymous, temporally disaggregated public—one that was outgrowing the traditional space-time of architecture but that still credited the traditional claim of the monumental to articulate shared beliefs and aspirations. Notes 1.  John Onions, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 62–63. 2.  The context of print culture and social change evoked here, as well as my larger argument about architecture and print, is drawn from my book, Architecture, Print Culture, and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France (London: Routledge, 2007). See also my article, “Architecture, Space, and Abstraction in the Eighteenth-Century French Public Sphere,” Representations 102 (Spring 2008), 1–26. 3.  Louis-Sebastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris (Paris: Mercure de France, 1994), vol. 1, 389–392, and vol. 2, 836–839 (first published 1781–1788). 4.  Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1985); Bernadette Fort, “Voice of the Public: The Carnivalization of Salon Art in Prerevolutionary Pamphlets,” Eighteenth Century Studies 22:3 (Spring 1989): 368–394; Richard Wrigley, The Origins of French Art Criticism (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1993). 5.  Fort, “Voice of the Public,” 370–371. 6.  Wrigley, Origins of French Art Criticism, 151–152. 7.  Étienne de La Font de Saint-Yenne, Réflexions sur quelques causes de l’ état présent de la peinture en France (The Hague: J. Neaulme, 1747), 137–139.

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8.  Dale Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution from Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560–1791 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 34–37, 73, and 140. 9.  Charles Hamel, Histoire de l’ église Saint-Sulpice (Paris: V. Lecoffre, J. Ga­ balda, 1909), 193–194; Van Kley, Religious Origins, 81. 10.  François-Victor Perrard de Montreuil, Nouveau Palais de Justice, d’après les plans de M. Perrard de Montreuil (Paris: P.-G. Simon, 1776). 11.  Durand Echeverria, The Maupeou Revolution: A Study in the History of Libertarianism, France, 1770–1774 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985). 12.  John Hardman, French Politics, 1774–1789: From the Accession of Louis XVI to the Fall of the Bastille (London and New York: Longman, 1995), 32–44. 13.  Perrard de Montreuil, Nouveau Palais de Justice, 10. 14.  Perrard de Montreuil, Nouveau Palais de Justice, 14–15. 15.  Charles Brenner, “Henri IV on the French Stage in the Eighteenth Century,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 46 (1931): 540–553. 16.  [Louis Petit de Bachaumont], Chanson sur la colonnade du Louvre, sur l’air: Allons la voir à S. Cloud, cette belle incomparable, n.p. [Paris]: n.p., n.d. [1755]. 17.  On June 27, 1748, the Paris Bureau des Marchands officially requested permission from Louis XV to build the square, although this was likely a formality consecrating a decision already taken by the crown (Richard Cleary, The Place Royale and Urban Design in the Ancien Régime, Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 212). 18.  Some were submitted to the government in manuscript form (many can be found at the Archives Nationales [01 158 –{228–321}]), but most were published as pamphlets or in contemporary periodicals such as the Mercure de France. 19.  See the proposals gathered in Lettres de divers auteurs sur le projet d’une place devant la colonnade du Louvre, pour y mettre la statue équestre du roi, ed. JeanBaptiste de La Curne de Sainte-Palaye (Paris: 1749). 20.  Étienne de La Font de Saint-Yenne, L’Ombre du Grand Colbert, le Louvre et la ville de Paris, dialogue (The Hague: n.p., 1749). 21.  La Font de Saint-Yenne, L’Ombre, pp. 6–9, 23. 22.  La Font de Saint-Yenne, L’Ombre, pp. 153–170. 23.  Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1989), 43–51. 24.  Sarah Maza, Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of PreRevolutionary France (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1993), esp. 10–17. 25.  H. Le Blanc, Architecture des églises anciennes et nouvelles (Paris: Le Gras, Pissot, & Briasson, 1733), 26–30. 26.  Amedée-François Frézier, “Lettre de M. Frézier, Ingénieur en Chef de Landau, à M. D. L. R. touchant les Observations de M. le Blanc sur le gout de l’Architecture des Eglises anciennes et nouvelles,” Mercure de France (July 1734): 1501–1503.

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27.  This claim is based on a systematic survey of European library catalogs and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century periodicals. See Architecture, Print Culture, and the Public Sphere, chapter 1. 28.  See Robert Muchembled, Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France 1400–1750 (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 11–180; Natalie Davis, “Printing and the People,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975), 189– 227; Jean Delumeau, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire: A New View of the Counter-Reformation (London and Philadelphia: Burns & Oates and Westminster Press, 1977); John Bossy, “The Counter-Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe,” Past and Present 47 (May 1970): 51–70; Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles (Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1 and passim. 29.  Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976). 30.  Though his focus is on a later period, Benedict Anderson offers suggestive ways of thinking about this (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism [London and New York: Verso, 1991], 22–36). 31.  On these terms, see Werner Szambien, Symétrie, goût, caractère (Paris: Picard, 1986), 92–98, 167–173. 32.  Jean Pagès, “L’Auguste Temple, ou Description de l’Eglise cathédrale de nôtre Dame d’Amiens,” (1708, with later interpolations through 1723), in volume 1 of Pagès’s “Notices historiques sur la ville d’Amiens” (Bibliothèque communale d’Amiens, ms 829 E [10 volumes]). The nineteenth-century publication of Pagès’s text is abridged and suppresses its dialogue format (Jean Pagès, Manuscrits de Pagès, Marchand d’Amiens. Ecrits à la fin du 17e et au commencement du 18e siècle, volume 5, Amiens: A. Caron, 1862). On Pagès see: Richard Wittman, “Local Memory and National Aesthetics: Jean Pagès’s Early Eighteenth-Century Description of the ‘Incomparable’ Cathedral of Amiens,” in Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade, eds. Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 259–279; and Wittman, Architecture, Print Culture, and the Public Sphere, chapter 2. 33.  One manifestation of this was sensationalist architectural theory. See [JeanFrançois de Bastide], “La Petite Maison,” Le Nouveau Spectateur 2 (1758): 361–412 (later published separately, as La Petite Maison [Paris: L. Cellot, 1762]); Nicolas Le Camus de Mezières, Le génie de l’architecture; ou, l’analogie de cet art avec nos sensations (Paris: Author and Benoit Morin, 1780); and Pierre-Joseph Antoine, Série des colonnes (Paris: Alexis Jombert jeune, 1782). Although neither discusses Antoine’s book, see Remy Saisselin, “Architecture and Language: The Sensationalism of Le Camus De Mézières,” British Journal of Aesthetics 15 (1975): 239–253; and Robin Middleton, “Introduction,” in Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières, The Genius of Architecture, or, The Analogy of that Art with our Sensations (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1992), 17–64.

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Allegory and Female Agency maureen quilligan

Why do allegorical personifications so often have female gender? Does it have anything to do with actual female agency? Is it simply a question of linguistic convenience having to do with the fairly arbitrary rules of gender in Latin and therefore in most romance languages? Or are there more interesting answers to be found to these questions? In a recent study of the underlying theological purposes of the use of female personifications in a vast range of medieval texts, Barbara Newman argues that the feminine gender of personifications allowed medieval writers a freedom to discuss religious concepts that would have been transgressive had they been predicated of the male trinity. For example, the three daughters of God that Christine de Pizan animates in the Livre de la Cité des Dames are female, according to Newman, because talk about the actual Trinity was too dangerous, and so it became convenient to talk about imaginary daughters instead. According to Newman, the positing of the existence of the many daughters of God enabled a far wider discursive space in which medieval writers could freely consider the nature of God: “It was much safer to theologize about them, than about the Trinity.”1 The

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­ aughters of God (Nature, Holychurch, Poverty, and so on) allowed discusd sion of religious experiences that did not fall within recognizable church doctrine; they also provided means for safely analyzing conflicts within divinity, similar to the power of personification to analyze human conflicts. Female personifications were theologically convenient. Gordon Teskey’s analysis in Allegory and Violence posits a far more compelling if also more problematic reason for the gender of personifications in allegorical narrative. For him, their gender specifies the peculiar kind of female agency that haunts any allegory. Because Teskey’s purview includes more literary history than that of the Middle Ages, his argument on the face of it may have more purchase on Renaissance practice than Newman’s. But Teskey’s argument also seems to be able to account for the real power of Newman’s thesis and thus, I think, deserves careful consideration. Teskey argues that personification is a trope by which abstractions, figured as masculine in Western philosophy, must take on the material agency of embodied nature, often imagined as feminine in the same philosophical tradition; the rhetorical figure of personification thus requires a violent appropriation of female materiality by male abstraction for the philosophical abstraction to gain narrative agency. Teskey’s important insight is that the “trace” of this violent and fully completed raptio lies in the characteristic predication of the feminine gender to refer to most personifications. Thus Justice becomes a woman who engages in just actions; Boethius’s Philosophy is a woman who carries books. In Le Roman de la Rose, Lady Reason is a woman who offers reasonable arguments. The violence is completely hidden, and the operation of personification looks perfectly pacific. According to Teskey, however, occasionally we can see this process of raptio or “capture” caught half way, and there the violence is fully on display. Two such moments are Francesca da Rimini’s lament in Dante’s Commedia and Amoret’s torture in Book III of Spenser’s Faerie Queene; both episodes reveal a similar violence in the figure of “capture,” where allegory makes clear the epistemological “rape” that is at the heart of the trope of personification. According to Teskey, neither Francesca nor Amoret are fullblown personifications because the philosophical process of the nonetheless violent transformation is incomplete, and we are thus treated to scenes that reveal the violence of the allegorical process itself: In the more powerful allegorical works this prevenient [sic] violence is unexpectedly revealed at moments that are so shocking in their honesty

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that they are consistently misread as departures from allegorical expression. Such moments literalize a metaphor from Neoplatonism, the moment of raptio, or “seizing,” in which Matter perversely resisting the desire of the male, must be ravished by Form before being converted and returned to the Father. We are confronted with a struggle in which the rift between heterogeneous others is forced into view. The woman continues forever to resist being converted into an embodiment of the meaning that is imprinted on her.

Both of the proof texts for his argument, the conversation with Francesca da Rimini in Dante’s Commedia and the torture of Amoret in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, are crucial moments in canonical texts. Perhaps more importantly for understanding the historical engagement of the trope of personification with actual female agency, they are also moments that two separate female authors (one medieval and one Renaissance) chose to revise with articulate and self-conscious protofeminist purposes. Teskey’s discussion of the gender of personification takes on a special relevance to any consideration of allegory and female agency because of the remarkable coincidence by which Christine de Pizan and Mary Wroth chose to revise his two proof texts.2 While I do not intend the following argument to be a wholesale endorsement of Teskey’s point that allegory depends on what he calls an “allelophagic” desire for mutual engulfing, I do think that his accounting for the prevalent female gender of personifications in allegorical narrative in terms of of the nature of neoplatonic philosophy is far more interesting than the less forceful cause (which I have relied on elsewhere) based on the grammar of certain classes of nouns in romance languages.3 At the very least, Christine de Pizan and Mary Wroth witness the interesting canniness of Teskey’s choice of proof texts. If he can unknowingly select two episodes in major canonical texts that were already tabbed some 600 and 400 years ago by two female writers as interesting moments they might wish to revise in specifically gendered terms, his theoretical inquiry may well have opened up some interesting connections between gender and allegory. Teskey’s invocation of Dante and Spenser episodes aims to make a point about the theoretical nature of allegory as a genre, which remains the same through all of its historical periods. By juxtaposing Christine’s rewrite of Dante with Wroth’s rewrite of Spenser, I hope to be able to see not only what remained the same in allegorical technique but also what changed from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. If we keep in mind Joan Kelly Gadol’s famous question—Did women have a Renaissance?—we may be

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able to see how Christine’s revisions of Dante and Wroth’s rewriting of Spenser elucidate very different potentialities in the genre of allegorical narrative, and so we can begin to gauge the changes in the genre from one historical period to the next. Christine’s rewrite of Dante in 1405 revivifies allegory by literalizing the feminine gender of personification; Christine’s revisions of Dante form a major contribution to the creation of the ­canon of texts for Western medieval literature and for the very institution of literature itself. Her revisions are foundational for the place of Dante within French literature and literature more broadly. Wroth’s revisions of Spenser in 1621 indicate allegory’s changing use as a narrative genre, heralding the beginning of narrative techniques, which respond to the changing economic substratum of society, an evolution to which Wroth pays due attention with her ironic imitations of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Paul Alpers was one of the first to note that the stanza of Amoret’s torture was a central moment for Spenser’s poetic: And her before the vile Enchaunter sate, Figuring straunge characters of his arte, With liuing bloud he those characters wrate, Dreadfully dropping from her dying hart, Seeming transfixed with a cruell dart, And all perforce to make her him to love, Ah who can love the worker of her smart?

Teskey agrees that the moment is pivotal and summarizes: “In a literary genre concerned more than any other with the metaphysical implications of gender, such moments are infrequent. It is more broadly characteristic of allegory—though by no means more true of it—for violence such as this to be concealed so that the female will appear to embody, with her whole body, the meaning that is imprinted on her.” Engaged with the metaphysical implications of gender and not merely responding to grammatical structures, as Teskey insists, allegory would thus appear to be a genre most conducive to investigations into the problematic exercise of female agency. Teskey points to the importance of Amoret’s act of resistance, and that she cannot be made to represent an allegorical character beyond herself. If Teskey is right, it makes sense that readers have found it difficult to specify the exact label for the scene of Amoret’s torture. While Amoret cannot be guilty herself of the transgressions for which we see her being punished, it is

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equally difficult to see how Spenser can escape the guilt that Busyrane exhibits in this shocking and writerly torture.4 As Harry Berger has succinctly put it, the “busy-reign of the male imagination becomes busier and more frenzied as the feminine will recoils in greater disdain or panic.”5 Teskey’s point about the gender question here is that by envisioning Amoret’s torture Spenser is only being honest about the machinery of his genre. Busyrane is not at fault in this scene; allegory is. Allegory—at least here—is held responsible for its necessary (and violent) appropriation of a female gendered materiality. In Teskey’s formulation, “material in allegory [is] that which gives meaning a place to occur but which does not become meaning itself” (p. 19). Such an argument about allegory—that makes women to be the material site of meaning when they can have no access to that meaning—situates allegorical processes within a problematic for female agency very similar to that which Claude Levi-Strauss exposed by saying that men use woman as signs in the semiotic system of kinship—predicated on the “traffic in women”—but that women cannot speak for themselves in that system.6 Such a curious congruence between modern anthropological theory and Renaissance philosophy helps to reinforce Teskey’s insistence on the philosophical importance of Spenser’s scene and to lend greater weight to his formulation that the force of gender difference subtends agency in philosophical narratives. As we shall see, the parallel also points to another odd congruence between Levi-Strauss’ understanding of the laws of kinship structure and the proof texts Teskey chooses for his discussion of female agency in allegorical narrative. Importantly, Teskey neglects to consider an important element of Spen­ ser’s scene (he is not writing a commentary on Spenser’s poem). Amoret is not the only female agent in Spenser’s scene. Britomart’s presence makes all the difference. The difference may not be due so much to the change from Dante’s Middle Ages to Spenser’s Renaissance as to the fact that Spenser was “shadowing” with Amoret’s sister, the armed warrior Belphoebe, one part of the nature of the actual female ruler who had immense agency over Spenser as a subject of her realm.7 Because Britomart—progenitor of Elizabeth I—is present in the scene, Amoret’s situation is very different from that of Dante’s Francesca, where instead of a female in full battle dress who makes oblique reference to a major female agency outside the text, there is a doubled male poetic tradition in the persons of Virgil and Dante. Spenser explicitly tells us that Book III, with its climactic scene of Amoret’s torture and release by

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Britomart, aims to elucidate Elizabeth I’s peculiar brand of chastity. Her presence as first reader of the text contextualizes its narrative as part of what Louis Montrose has recently called “the Elizabethan imaginary,” a set of cultural codes that aimed to adjust to the anomalous power Elizabeth, as woman, held in a patriarchal society.8 Britomart’s bizarre contextualization in Spenser’s text by strange incest narratives also point to an uncanny congruence between the issue of gender in this allegory and Levi-Strauss’ arguments about incest. In Book V Britomart dreams of coupling with her beloved under the guise of Isis and Osiris, incestuous brother and sister.9 While Francesca exercises a most important agency, Paolo does not. She speaks. He does not. And indeed Francesca speaks to resist the justice of the punishment meted out to her and her partner, so she speaks for him. As with Spenser, Teskey again tends to slide by a problematic part of the gender issue he uncovers in his discussion of Francesca’s objections. While he notes that, as with Spenser’s insistence on Amoret’s resistance, Dante lays bare the workings of allegory in the Paolo and Francesca scene, Teskey also mentions the pivotal importance of Semiramis: “In reading the episode it is of some importance not to mistake which sin is reaching out to Francesca to make her its mask. Given the authority with which the word lust has been applied to her, it should be noted that the word lussuria is used in the canto only to characterize Semiramis, a rather special case” (p. 26). Teskey thinks Semiramis’s “special” nature—that she is guilty of incestuous lust, while Francesca is guilty only of acting on her desire—allows Francesca legitimately to complain against the punishment given her. While Semiramis may indeed be a special case in notions of female lust, the extremity of the case of mother–son incest may not be so easily cordoned off from other exertions of female agency and desire. Just as Spenser places Britomart and her incest-haunted desire within the scene with Amoret, so Dante’s episode also includes it. This congruence, unremarked by Teskey, is important. In her now classic article critiquing Levi-Strauss, Gayle Rubin has built on Levi-Strauss and importantly argued that the incest taboo is constructed to interdict any sort of active female desire, not merely desire for a close family member.10 Any fully active female desire is as threatening to the proper traffic in women as Semiramis’s trammeling of the law against mother–son incest, because any desire that does not simply follow the prescriptions of the men who do the trading threatens to halt the exchange. Incest is thus the special case that authorizes the suppression of all active female desire; the laws of exchange require a quiescent female desire that

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will passively follow the path for the traffic chosen by males. Any active female desire is tantamount to incest itself and thus any exhibition of female agency will naturally signal this extreme limit case. At least, both Dante’s and Spenser’s proof texts do so, quite noticeably. It is not just Christine de Pizan who witnesses Semiramis’s importance in Dante’s text. As if to prove that Semiramis’s position in the first circle of hell is no mere accident by association, Boccaccio made her the first famous pagan woman he discussed in the De Claris Mulieribus. For Boccaccio, she is famous both for her great achievements and also for the great sin of incest that stained everything she did. When Christine thus chooses to make Semiramis one of the first stories she tells in her own book about famous women, specifically making hers the first foundation stone in the building of the allegorical City of Ladies, she not only imitates her immediate precursor Boccaccio, she also reinvests Dante’s Semiramis with a discursive power Dante denigrates in her. Dante has Francesca condemn the book Paolo and Francesca have been reading, just as Christine herself condemned the immoral sexuality of Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose. Christine would thus have found Dante’s strictures about reading the wrong literature as central to her own way of assessing literature. (In her letters against the Rose, she counseled her readers to read Dante rather than Jean.11) Christine’s defense of Semiramis depends on the specific literary terms of Dante’s denegration. According to Dante, Semiramis is evil because she “libito fe licito in sua legge” (she made lust licit in her laws). In contrast, Christine reverses these terms in her exoneration of Semiramis because, when she had sexual intercourse with her son, “adonc n’estoit encore point de loy escripte” (there was as yet no written law).12 While Dante’s Semiramis decrees her own law, Christine’s lives before a written one. Christine’s emphasis on the written nature of the law speaks not only to the legal ramifications of the elementary structure of kinship as Levi-Strauss terms incest, but also to the fascinating violence of the written, the violence itself enacted in the reading Francesca and Paolo undertake.13 Christine’s Semiramis not only responds to Dante’s argument against the Babylonian queen, she also situates herself outside the institution of literature, importantly prior to it. This is not to argue that Christine denigrates literature or writing itself; indeed she is trying to bring an oral tradition into the realm of letters, correcting the erroneous version passed on by the misogynist, male-authored textual transmission. Christine is also clearly interested in Dante’s Semiramis because she is twinned with Dido, another lustful queen, but one

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who also built a city. Her choice to begin building her city with Semiramis is thus profoundly bound up with the fundamental nature of the empirefounding agency of women, and Christine duly tells Dido’s story later in her text. Francesca is, for her part, a mere reader of Arthurian romance, that is, the reader of a story where a queen’s infidelity destroys a kingdom. Augustine had gone notoriously astray in his pity for Dido; Dido’s creator also stands before Francesca as one of her accusers in Dante’s hell. Dante’s scene is thus profoundly associated with the power reading and writing have in deciding the kinds of cities one is going to build. Like Augustine himself, who turns away from Virgil, Christine critiques her own precursor Dante when she rehabilitates Semiramis. While Christine is, as I hope I have here suggested, an inspired and profoundly nuanced reader of Dante, whom she imitates in myriad subtle ways in other texts, she also understands that, to found a female tradition of authority, she will have to stand outside the tradition of male auctores. Dante’s turn away from Virgil to Beatrice, a Christian woman, reenacts the step taken by Augustine, but Christine needs to take it, as she does here, at the outset of her narrative, not midway through. Hence her insistence on the written nature of the law before which Semiramis lives. As I have elsewhere argued in greater detail, Christine accentuates the unscripted, oral quality of the female authorities she follows in her building of the city.14 Dante’s Semiramis stands for the illicit law opposed to the one that decrees the architecture of hell down which Vergil and Dante scramble in the In­ferno. Christine takes the illicit “legge” Dante associates with Semiramis and gives to it her own legitimacy, making it provide the foundation, literally so, in terms of her own architectural metaphor, for an alternate, un­written tradition of female authority. That the walls of the city are circular may also be further testimony to her conscious troping of Dante’s structure. The canniness of Teskey’s reasoning about Francesca’s resistance to the “imprinting” of the word lust is thus strangely anticipated by Christine’s defense of Semiramis’s relationship to the written. Amoret is absolutely engaged in resisting Busyrane’s bloody script; Christine’s revision of the Francesca episode makes the inherent violence of that same writing quite clear. Semiramis does not know the written law that would condemn her; Francesca, a mere girl and a reader, resists that law and in the process speaks for the two queens whom Dante renders silent. Compared to Dido and Semiramis, Francesca is a nobody; she builds no city, wins no battles, rules over no kingdoms. She is a far easier mark. Compared to the fully em-

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bodied personification of lust, however, Francesca has a compelling tragic story that lures us to a sympathy Augustine was wrong to feel for Virgil’s queen. However mild, private, timid, and domesticated Francesca’s romantic sexual desires may seem in comparison to Semiramis’s and Dido’s heroic accomplishments, even she cannot be silenced utterly. She is doubtless there to silence them, speaking as she does for them (would Dante’s Dido have had something more to say than Virgil’s did?); but even she makes a compelling case for herself. Christine makes an even more compelling case for Semiramis, even though Semiramis does not speak for herself. Instead, Lady Reason narrates her story to Christine herself, named (as Dante is) as the author of the text the reader reads. If we may, for a moment, compare the disposition of the scenes in Dante and in Christine with respect to their dramatis personae: (1) Francesca speaks to Dante and Virgil; (2) Lady Reason speaks to Christine about Semiramis. As such a comparison makes clear, Lady Reason stands in the place of the primary narrator. What we have, in broad outline, is Christine’s replacement of Francesca as speaker for female agency with her own Lady Reason, a personification. In Teskey’s terms then, Christine privileges the full fledged personification Lady Reason over Francesca, the figure of “capture” who still exercises some rudiment of materialized female agency. Seen from this perspective, Christine’s rewrite proves Teskey wrong when he argues that the figure of capture speaks for the repressed female materia as a personification can never do; either that, or it demonstrates that Christine is an allegorist who chooses not to show the violence allegory does to feminine materia, another instance, Sheila Delaney might say, of her remarkable conservatism. Christine’s current standing among allegorists, certainly not as high as Spenser’s or Dante’s, suggests that perhaps she is less “strong” than they, who can risk the revelation of allegory’s prevenient violence. As I very much hope to help adjust her standing in the canon (which she did so much to create, especially Dante’s position within it) I do not think such an option is the one to select. Instead, we need to see what further purposes the Semiramis episode serves in Christine’s intervention into the canon of allegorical literature. In the City of Ladies, Lady Reason is a direct answer to Jean de Meun’s Raison. Christine had already privileged Dante over the Roman de la Rose; she specifically names Dante, but refers to Jean’s poem by its title, thus deny­ing him the status of auctor while conferring that status on Dante. She specifically explains that Jean’s poem is the text that most needs to be critiqued in its misogyny. In a direct rewrite of the interview between Amant

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and Raison in the Rose, Lady Reason tells Christine that those who have attacked women “ce ne vint onques de moy” (“have never originated with me [Reason]”) (p. 643; p. 18). Such a specific attack on the authority of Jean’s figure, Raison, allows the gender of the figure in Christine’s text to assume a literalness that recuperates some of the materiality lost to the abstraction in the process of personification. The position of a “real” human female Christine, author of the text and possessor of the same ontological space as Dante and Virgil in the Commedia, revivifies the personification in ways that are not entirely available in a male-authored text; or, at least, a text that does not make the question of gender difference so specifically a focus in the conversation between the two interlocutors. Because Christine’s critique is leveled at a mindless tradition of the empty citation of literary authorities, which contrasts to the evidence presented by Christine’s own physical female body, the text negotiates the interstice between materiality and literary abstraction as its specific overt topic: Autres, pour monstrer que ils on biaucoup veu d’escriptures, se fondent sur ce qu’ ilz ont trouvé en livres et dient après les autres et aleguent les autteurs. (p. 643) Others, in order to show they have read many authors, base their own writings on what they have found in books and repeat what other writers have said and cite different authors. (p. 18)

Lady Reason’s understanding of Semiramis’s transgression of an as-yetto-be-written incest taboo stands outside the textual tradition mindlessly handed down by men. Before Reason narrates Semiramis’s story, she helps Christine to carry away all the dirt of misogynist opinion left lying all over the “field of letters.” All allegorical narrative proceeds by means of such literalizing of the metaphors inherent in the trope of personification; literalizing the gender of such figures is another version of the wordplay generic to allegorical narrative.15 Christine even plays with her own name as the feminine form of Christ when Lady Justice narrates the story of Saint Christine, who receives her name directly from Jesus. Justice emphasizes the violence of this story—the longest of the saints’ lives narrated in this section, specifically the excision of Saint Christine’s tongue, so that she is able to spit a piece of it into her torturer’s eye, blinding him. As such a grisly detail implies, female personifications understand the violence done to material bodies—both male and female.

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The vast testimony Barbara Newman has amassed to demonstrate the widespread theological instrumentality of female personifications throughout a number of centuries underscores the need for “safety”; her argument implicitly assumes that violence does, in fact, threaten somewhere in the arena of theological debate that the daughters of God enabled writers to evade. To say, as Newman does, that the goddesses provide “safe” havens is another way of saying that no violence will happen in the landscapes they populate, an argument that bears at least a remote relationship to Teskey’s own formulation. Teskey’s fundamental point is that we do not ordinarily see the violence of personification except in those few strange places where the greatest allegorical poets allow us to view its mechanisms stripped bare in the moment of incomplete “capture”; the rest of the time, the medieval narratives operate with just the efficient analytical “safety” Newman so beautifully describes in the many texts she elegantly surveys. It is important to remember that very existence of the Trinity owes its own special internal dynamic between the Father and the only begotten Son to the female materiality the Son borrows from His human mother so that he may, in fact, be able to suffer a violent death on the cross. It may be impertinent to argue that while the Logos is far more than a mere personification, the violence done His materiality is one of the most crucial elements of His Passion. To say, then, as Newman does, that the theological nature of the goddesses in medieval literature guarantees their distance from the violence that would threaten any discussion of the actual male Trinity itself calls attention to the miraculous disruption of normative human relations required by the very theology of the Incarnation and Passion. The violence of the Passion allows the Christian revision of Old Testament written law. Teskey and Newman are not, finally, in essential disagreement about the profound philosophical and theological difficulties allegorical personifications manage, in their normal workings, to evade. In Teskey’s second scene of “capture” the violence is impossible to forget: Amoret’s heart is withdrawn from her chest cavity and placed in a bowl of blood: At that wide orifice her trembling hart Was drawne forth, and in siluer basin layd, Quite through transfixed with a deadly dart, And in her bloud yet steeming fresh embayd. (3.12.21)

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It is this “wound” that the female warrior Britomart makes disappear; she forces Busyrane to reverse his verses: The creull steele, which thrild her dying hart, Fell softly forth, as of his owne accord, And the wide wound, which lately did dispart Her bleeding brest, and riuen bowels gor’d, Was closed vp, as it had not been bor’d, And euery part to safety full sound, As she were neuer hurt, was soone restor’d’ Tho when she felt her selfe to be unbound And perfect hole, prostrate she fell vnto the ground. (3.12.38)

Such an undoing of sadistic art has at times been read as playing on the image of the postcoital detumescent penis. If so, the genital terms can be seen aptly to literalize the Neoplatonic metaphor of raptio, which Teskey argues subtends the scene. Similarly, readers have also noticed that being rendered perfectly “hole” does not mean that Amoret is no longer penetrable; though virginal, she is still capable of intercourse, that womanly potential being indeed her characteristic quality.16 But what no readers have remarked is that the horrifyingly large and gaping wound that closes up to a normal “hole,” from which formerly protruded a large and detached bloody object, very accurately mimes the gory actualities of childbirth. In childbirth, an internal body part does seem to be torturously extruded from the female vagina, which, rather startlingly, then returns to its former state and without a death-dealing amount of pain. (In this context it is perhaps important that the stanza does not describe the heart’s reinsertion into the body but simply the closure of the opening, as if the point is not to reinsert the pulsing organ but simply to close the “wide wound.”) If such a suggestion is not wildly off the mark, it more fully fleshes out, as it were, the bare theoretical frame of Teskey’s argument. Amoret’s materiality not only resists being turned into an abstraction, that materiality also reenacts the original function of materia, parturition itself. Amoret’s experience of a horrific fantasm of childbearing radically contrasts with her own painless birthing by her mother Chrysogone in the Garden of Adonis, which as a landscape in and of itself represents the cosmological purpose of corporeal generation. The narrative of Book III continues to circle back onto this essential issue of female chastity.17

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To suggest this new understanding of one aspect of Amoret’s “torture” is not fundamentally to revise our traditional interpretation of what Busyrane is attempting to do to her or why. It may serve instead as one more way of seeing his attempt to textualize Amoret’s experience; that is, to turn Amoret’s physical, material experience into a poetic text by borrowing her fecund, bodily based creativity to make poetry of his own. To see the healing that Britomart helps to achieve as one that images what happens to the female body at the moment of giving birth is, however, to see in a new and useful way what it is that Britomart learns from attending on Amoret. This moment of magically self-healing physical protrusion (this bloody creativity) is precisely where Britomart’s own heroically erotic energies are leading her. (We are given another brief glimpse of this moment of parturition in Book V when Britomart dreams of giving birth to a lion in Isis Church.)18 When Wroth rewrites Spenser’s scene, she is clearly more interested in switching the genders of the protagonists than in commenting on the underlying issue of childbirth. In Spenser’s scene, the enchanter Busyrane is a sadistic sonneteer, who writes strange characters with Amoret’s heart’s blood. In Wroth’s variation on this episode, the poet Pamphilia is the rescuer, not the torturer, and the torture victim is Amphilanthus, a character based on her own beloved first cousin, William Herbert, the third Earl of Pembroke, and therefore male. The torturers are icons of female sexual predatoriness, rivals to the heroine. While the fact that the victim is male means that Wroth is unable to consider the issue of childbirth embedded in the heart of Spenser’s episode, the names of the characters Wroth has chosen to give the torturers are very suggestive. Musalina, although she is a fully developed character in the text and one of the heroine’s main rivals for the beloved Amphilanthus, has a name that allies her with the muses. She may thus name the problem of Petrarchan discourse overtly addressed in Spenser’s scene, where the process of torture is also the process of writing. The other torturer is Lucenia, who, like Musalina, is a fully developed character in the fiction and who, therefore, is more than merely her name. But like Musalina, her name has a quite specific resonance; Lucenia recalls Saint Lucena, who was the Roman saint of childbirth. If such an allusion were intended by Wroth (and one wishes that it were clearer that it was: Wroth’s character Lucenia has nothing immediately discernable to do with children or childbirth elsewhere in the text), then it would be possible to claim that Wroth, as a female reader of Spenser’s text, had, in fact, intuited the physiological events implicit in the scene of Amoret torture. Wroth did in

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fact herself give birth to two illegitimate children fathered by William Herbert, the man on whom Amphilanthus is modeled. Musalina and Lucenia might well then refer obliquely to the two most compelling reasons Amphilanthus/Herbert might have for remaining loyal to Pamphilia/ Wroth: Wroth’s expertise in poetry and her also having given birth to Herbert’s children.19 The location of the scene of torture is a ring of stones reminiscent of Stonehenge, which was an easy ride from the Earl of Pembroke’s seat at Wilton. The details of the scene are thus tied quite closely to Wroth’s own relationship with her first cousin. Wroth’s rewrite of Spenser poses another immense contrast: Britomart succeeds in her rescue of Amoret from torture, while Pamphilia fails: Pamphilia adventured, and pulling hard at a ring of iron which appeared, opned the great stone, when a doore shewed entrance, but within she might see a place like a Hell of flames, and fire, and as if many walking and throwing pieces of men and women up and downe the flames, partly burnt, and they still stirring the fire . . . the longer she looked, the more she discernd, yet all as in the hell of deceit, at last she saw Musalina sitting in a Chaire of Gold, a Crowne on her head, and Lucenia holding a sword, which Musalina took in her hand, and before them Amphilanthus was standing, with his heart ript open, and Pamphilia written in it, Musalina ready with the point of the sword to conclude all, by razing that name out, and so his heart as the wound to perish. (p. 494)20

Wroth’s rescripts Spenser’s already literalized set of conceits in Amoret’s torture by having the written name “Pamphilia” visible on Amphilanthus’s fleshly heart. The detail is authorized by Spenser’s own practice in the first poem of the Amoretti, where his beloved reader is asked to read what has been written by tears in “heart’s close bleeding book.”21 The bits and pieces of burnt male and female lover’s flesh derive from the dismembering tradition of the Petrarchan blazon, which is clearly one influence on this baroque scene of torture.22 But what is most striking about Wroth’s revision of Spenser’s scene is that the moral values are completely reversed. Pamphilia tries vainly to come to Amphilanthus’s rescue, but she is unable to do so, not because she may, like Scudamour, be implicated in some way in causing the torture, nor because she has no powers of aggression (nothing comparable to Britomart’s magic—and some have thought phallic—lance), but because only false lovers are able to enter such an arena. All-loving Pamphilia is too true and constant (read “chaste”) to pass through the flames:

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so with as firm, and as hot flames as those she saw, and more bravely and truly burning, she ran into the fire, but presently she was throwne out again in a swound, and the doore shut; when she came to her selfe, cursing her destinie, meaning to attempt again, shee saw the stone whole, and where the way into it was, there were these words written:   Faithfull lovers keep from hence   None but false ones here can enter:   This conclusion hath from whence   Falsehood flowes, and such may venter. (p. 494)

Britomart had ignored the script over the doors in Busyrane’s palace and had gone in a “bold Britonesse.” Pamphlia has all the courage necessary to do the same. The problem is that the enchanted site rejects her because of her very virtue. This site is the polar opposite of another enchanted place, the palace of Venus on Cyprus, where Pamphilia has already shown her heroism. There, by the power of her virtue constancy, Pamphilia is able to open the doors to the castle and to free the lovers. She is, however, unable even to remain for long within this “hell of deceit.” It is as if Poverty, or Chastity itself, were trying to enter Deduit’s Garden of Love in the Roman de la Rose. Such virtues must remain arranged as statues on the outside of the garden wall, decorating it, but incapable of entering it. As Wroth’s contrasting sites attest, her use of landscape allegory insists on the defining character of the moral virtue of constancy (the titular virtue for the incomplete seventh book of Spenser’s epic). Pamphilia is the heroine of the Urania because she is the truest, most constant lover, the most all-loving. Wroth’s huge romance, then, rewrites Spenser’s satirical Squire of Dames dilemma as well as the constancy test of the Argalus and Parthenia episode in the Arcadia.23 One might also say that Wroth rewrites the “Mutabilitie Cantos” as well, insisting by doing so that the female is the principle not of Mutabilitie, but of Constancy. As we see in the repeat of the Amoret-torture scene, when it is Pamphilia’s (and not Amphilanthus’s) chest that is torn open, Pamphilia’s experience in the earlier scene in Venus’s palace remains central to the Wroth’s manipulation of Spenser’s allegorical techniques. The scene of the enchanted castle on Cyprus is the climax of Book I of the Urania. It is also the scene selected to be portrayed on the title page of the printed volume (Figure 7.1). It is clearly an important moment in the text, and thus its links to the episode that rewrites Amoret’s torture are key to what Worth aims to accomplish in her use of personification. When

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Figure 7.1.  Title page of Mary Wroth’s 1621 The Countess of Mountgomeries . . . Urania. Reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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Pamphilia releases the prisoners in the Castle of Love on Cyprus by giving to Amphilanthus the key that the statue of Constancy has just given to her, the personification of Constancy as represented in the statue on the bridge disappears into Pamphilia’s breast: Both then at once extremely loving, and love in extremity in them, made the Gate flie open to them, who passed to the last Tower where Constancy stood holding the keyes, which Pamphilia tooke; at which instant Constancy vanished, as metamorphosing her self into her breast; then did the excellent Queene deliver them to Amphilanthus, who joyfully receiving them, opened the Gate. (p. 169)

Here, it is almost as if, to use Teskey’s formulation, the allegorical abstraction Constancy has effected a “capture” of Pamphilia, transforming her irremediably. It seems to be on the basis of this moment that Pamphilia later says that she must become of a different “constitution” for other thoughts to fall into her breast so that she would become able to love someone other than Amphilanthus. Like Amoret’s, Pamphilia’s breast later becomes the site of her own baroquely imagined torture; Constancy’s transformation into that breast allows us to see how carefully Wroth prepares her rewrite of Spenser. Her series of scenes seem almost explicitly to address Teskey’s understanding of what is at stake in the negotiations of female authority with allegorical personifications. The mediating text in the first disenchantment episode is Ovid’s Metamorphosis; it is again recalled in Constancy’s “metamorphosing her self” into Pamphilia’s breast. It appears first in the description of the statue of Venus, which is compared to Pygmalion’s masterpiece. (Wroth rewrites Ovid constantly in the Urania, regendering, as Roberts points out, Ovid’s tale of Arethusa and Byblis.24) To recall the myth of the transformation of Pygmalion’s statue into a real woman is to move in reverse along the path Teskey calls the “half way process” of capture, that is, the movement is away from abstraction toward materiality. This is also true of the relationship between Constancy and Pamphilia: Constancy vanishes, transformed into the breast of a real woman, almost as if Wroth herself might be meditating on Shakespeare’s rewrite of the Pygmalion myth in The Winter’s Tale—where the statue can move because it has always been a real, aging, female body. In each of these rehearsals what gets insisted on is that the woman is real, the artwork is not.25 Pamphilia is half-captured, not by constancy, but by love. This very half capture has made her into a poet. She is not the dead and lifeless work

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of art but the artist who creates poetry out of her sufferings as a constant woman. When we hear Pamphilia and Urania debate the problems surrounding “this word constancy” as Urania derisively terms it, she gives Pamphilia the opportunity to articulate her own ontological status in relation to the term. Urania criticizes Pamphilia for loving her brother Amphilanthus, but not because theirs is an unsuitable match between first cousins (although Urania has just been cured of a parallel attachment to Pamphilia’s brother by Amphilanthus’s ministrations in Saint Maura); Urania’s point is rather that Pamphilia deserves someone better than her inconstant brother. (Although apparently acceptable, an official union between the two is never contemplated by anyone, even though both principals are unmarried and later—in the manuscript continuation—freely marry others.) Because Amphilanthus has been constantly inconstant to her, so Urania reasons, Pamphilia too should be allowed a change in her affections. Urania argues against Pamphilia’s obstinate refusal to do so: ’Tis pitie said Urania, that ever that fruitlesse thing Constancy was taught you as a vertue, since for vertues sake you will loue it, as having true possession of your soule, but understand, this vertue hath limits to hold it in, being a vertue, but thus that it is a vice in them that breake it, but those with whom it is broken, are by the breach free to leave or choose againe where more staidnes may be found. (p. 470)

Urania does not, of course, specifically single out herself as a happy instance of those who find greater contentment in change, although Amphilanthus did save her a period of sorrow by pitching her over the cliff, thereby drowning out memories of her unsuitable love. For her part, Pamphilia insists on the willful activity of her desire, irrespective of anything Amphilanthus might or might not do to deserve her devotion. Pamphilia’s position seems at first glance to be quite masochistic; however, on closer scrutiny of its specific terms, it demonstrates rather that she has a will of her own and that she exercises full command over it to institute her own active desire as her possession of herself. Urania charges her with something like having been captured by the abstraction “constancy,” which has taken “possession” of her. Pamphilia insists that her virtue is her own: To leave him for being false would shew my love was not for his sake, but mine owne, that because he loved me, I therefore loved him, but when hee leaves I can do so to. O no deere Cousen I loved him for himselfe, and

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would have loved him had hee not loued mee, and will love though he dispise me. . . . Pamphilia must be of a new composition before she can let such thoughts fall into her constant breast, which is a Sanctuary of zealous affection, and so well hath love instructed me, as I can never leave my master nor his precepts, but still maintaine a vertuous constancy. (p. 470)

As paradoxical as it may sound, Pamphilia’s point is really that if she loved Amphilanthus only as a return for his loving her, her desire would have its origin in the male’s desire; then female desire would remain a mere reflective repetition of male desire. To locate an active desire in her female self, she needs her own will to be autonomous. While she appears to depend on him, taking her identity from loving him constantly, she in fact insists on an identity impervious to any action he might take. Her constancy is, finally, an act of willful self-definition. She “will love though he despise” her. The “master” whose instructions she follows is love itself, the Amor of an older tradition of love poetry, not the boy Cupid but a mature Lord of Love such as the one who instructed Amant in the Roman de la Rose. Pamphilia defines herself by the constant breast she maintains—and the anatomical location of the “sanctuary” she celebrates here is the same place where Amoret’s torture takes place, and, consequently, Wroth’s rewritings of that scene of torture. Pamphilia’s tenacity derives not merely from a biographical choice ­clearly made by Wroth herself in her illegitimate alliance with her inconstant cousin William Herbert. Rather this pivotal conversation between the two lead female characters in her narrative has deeply embedded connections to Wroth’s rewrite of Spenser’s allegory in The Faerie Queene. When Pamphilia remarks that she cannot let thoughts of a new lover “fall into her constant breast” until she is of a new composition, she borrows for herself the authority of a personification without, I would like to suggest, sacrificing her own female agency. The ultimate revision of the moment of torture—which again insists on the unreality of the artwork in contrast to the living woman—is the vision Amphilanthus has of Pamphilia in the Hell of deceit. Already replicating the scene in which Pamphilia sees Amphilanthus being tortured by women (with his heart ripped out of his chest cavity and Musilina trying to erase Pamphilia’s name from its surface), Amphilanthus’s vision is a return to the original gender arrangements of Spenser’s scene in which Amoret is tortured by Busyrane:

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A Ring of iron hee then saw, which pulling hard, opened the stone; there did he perceive perfectly within it Pamphilia dead, lying within an arch, her breast open, and in it his name made, in little flames burning like pretty lamps which made the letters as if set round with diamonds, and so cleare it was, as hee distinctly saw the letters ingraven at the bottom in characters of bloud; he ran to take her up, and try how to uncharme her, but he was instantly throwne out of the Cave in a trance, and being come again to himself, resolving to dye, or to release her since he found her ­loyalty, he saw these words onely written in place of the entrance.   This no wonder’s of much waight,   ’Tis the hell of deepe deceite. (pp. 655–656)

Pamphilia here seems to have been turned into a dead icon of “loyalty,” as if the “capture,” in Teskey’s sense, had been total. Here too we get fully literalized, the “characters of blood” in Busyrane’s kind of writing. The narrative itself, however, undercuts this vision; it is not, finally, “of much weight,” for the vision is a false one, of “deep deceit.” It is not that Pamphilia is not false but that she is not dead. She is, in fact, alive, whole, and still loving of Amphilanthus. If only inconstant lovers can be “in” the hell of deceit, the place is capable of offering only deceitful visions. What Amphilanthus sees is a false vision, rather like the false vision created by Archimago that leads the Redcrosse Knight astray in Book I of The Faerie Queene. Through its falsity, however, Amphilanthus understands the truth, that Pamphilia is constant. Her constancy, however, is not a dead thing but fully agented. A few paragraphs after this vision, Pamphilia appears in the narrative, unharmed in any way. Amphilanthus may imagine Pamphilia constant and dead; but she is, in fact, quite alive. The conclusion of the first enchantment in Book I had hinted at Pamphilia’s freely chosen agency, for there the force named by another term takes the place of Constancy in effecting the happy outcome. The narrator explains how the prisoners in the Tower of Love are finally released: [Pamphilia and Amphilanthus] then passed into the Gardens, where round about a curious Fountaine were fine seates of white Marble, which after, or rather with the sound of rare and heavenly musick, were filled with those poore lovers who were there inmprisoned, all chain’d one unto another with linkes of gold, enameled with Roses and other flowers dedicated to Love: then was a voice heard, which delivered these wordes: “Loyallest, and therefore most incomparable Pamphilia, release the Ladies, who must to your worth, with all other of your sexe, yeeld right

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preheminence: and thou Amphilanthus, the valliantest and worthiest of thy sex, give freedome to the Knights, who with all other must confessee thee matchlesse: and thus is Love by love and worth released.” (p. 170)

Wroth may well be punning on her own name in insisting on the “worth” that pairs with love to release the prisoners. Because “worth” is predicated of her preeminence among women, we are invited to see Wroth’s authorial character present in Pamphilia’s achievement. Paradoxically, Pamphilia’s “worthiness,” like Stella’s “richness” in Sidney’s sonnet cycle, is declared by the husband’s name. (Like Bess of Hardwick’s initials “ES,” Wroth’s name further signifies her identity as a widow, on which rests at least some of her free agency.) Within the fiction of the romance, Pamphilia is as famous for her poetry as is Amphilanthus. When she complains of his infidelity and insists in poem after poem on her own constancy, she borrows the authority of the personification of the virtue, but she bases her own agency on her refusal to respond to the fluctuating demands of male desire. Hers is an active volition that is to be distinguished from the personified abstraction she not so much refuses to become (like Dante’s Francesca), in Teskey’s formulation, but that she contains within herself to make it a defining characteristic of her own will. What Wroth has done then is to reformulate a transgressively active female desire, dressing it up in a traditional female virtue, patient constancy. Out of this maneuver, she creates Pamphilia’s authority, institutionalized in the poems of the sonnet cycle appended to the Urania. In the process she adjusts the terms of romantic fiction in the direction of the ironic realism Cervantes opened up as a possible avenue in Don Quixote. In her edition of the Urania, Josephine Roberts outlined Wroth’s debts to Cervantes as one of the most important influences on her work.26 A signal moment Roberts mentions is Wroth’s revision of Spenser’s use of Una’s emblematic lamb in Book I of The Faerie Queene; Wroth gives Urania a lamb; but, rather than see it as a symbol of innocence and purity, Urania cooks it for supper. As Roberts puts it: “Wroth’s sudden shift from Lamb of God to lamb chops reveals a rupture between the world of high idealism and that of hard, pragmatic circumstance” similar to the juxaposition of the two in Cervantes’ book (p. xxiii). The very frontispiece to the romance indicates the importance of Cervantes, for in the upper-right-hand corner of the landscape there is an odd windmill; the climactic scene of disenchantment when the statue of

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­ onstancy metamorphoses into the living breathing Pamphilia, then, inC cludes a visual signal of its Cervantean context.27 The picture is of the moment just before the female artist may be said to master the personification, when Amphilanthus and Pamphilia walk toward the statues on the bridge. This artist can even have a conversation with another woman about the virtue at hand, rejecting the possibility that she has been possessed by it. Wroth thus avails herself of the full panoply of allegorical techniques to display the sumptuous and violent elegance of the personified virtue she masters and makes the fuel of her art. In the process she reinvests the violence of the allegorical process of personification, reversing (just as Britomart forces Busyrane to undo) the masculinist falsity of vision to reveal an ironic perspective on the possibilities of romance narrative. This irony is far more subtle than Sancho’s being tossed in a blanket for nonpayment of inn bills because Don Quixote thought they were staying as guests of a great lord in a chivalric castle of his reading-maddened imagination. Typical of Wroth’s irony is a scene in which Musalina, Lucenia, and Amphilanthus again figure centrally: The scene plays out the issue of woman’s constancy with the irony characteristic of Wroth’s wry narrator. A nameless country girl complains to the three courtiers about losing her love to a grand Lady, which proves the natural inconstancy of men. Wroth allows the country girl to comment on the great change in social attitudes toward the relative values placed on male and female virtue; it is a change that Wroth’s narrative, in effect, is helping to bring about: For believe it, the kindest, lovingst, passionatest, worthiest, loveliest, valientest, sweetest, and best man, will, and must change, not that he, it may be, doth it purposely, but tis their naturall infirmite, and cannot be helped. It was laid to our charge in times passed to bee false, and changing, but they who excelle us in all perfections, would not for their honours sake, let us surpasse them in any one thing, though that, and now are much more perfet, and excellent in that then wee, so there is nothing left us, that they excel us not in, although in our greatest fault. (p. 440)

Roberts cites a similar sentiment on the part of the narrator, who comments in passing about some nameless gentleman: “But being a man, it was necessary for him to exceede a woman in all things, so much as inconstancie was found fit for him to excelle her in, hee left her for a new” (p. lviii). Engaged in the philosophical debates about women that were popular in the opening decades of Jacobean rule, Wroth (like Christine before her) shapes al-

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legorical technique to her own ends in the defense of women. In the process she participates in the inception of a radically different kind of narrative, hospitable to enchantments but also able to scrutinize with wry irony the romantic assumptions of chivalric myth. Clearly empowered by the gendered forces contending within the allegorical figure of personification, Christine and Wroth both revisit its violent workings to provide forceful narratives about the agency of women. Christine writes at one moment when allegorical narrative was at its most powerful; her move is thus to intervene in its canonical lists of texts, aiming quite specifically to insert her own female authority and within that canon. Writing at a far different moment, just before allegorical narrative turns into the “ruin” Walter Benjamin held it to be in the baroque period,28 Wroth stages the relationship between a female protagonist and the virtue she embodies so that the woman takes on the authority of the personification, not, as Teskey has it, the reverse. In the process, Wroth allows a wonderfully parodic irony to pervade the wit of her text, commenting on the earlier allegorical tradition and showing how personification allegory works before it disappears within the narrator’s specific authorial agency. Notes 1.  Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), p. 39. 2.  Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, l996). pp. 18–19. 3.  The Allegory of Female Authority: Christine de Pizan’s “Livre de la Cité des Dames” (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 23–27. 4.  Susan Frye, Elizabeth I: The Competition over Representation (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 124–135, argues for Spenser’s complicity in Busyrane’s rape of Amoret. 5.  Harry, Berger, Revisionary Play: Studies in Spenserian Dynamics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 179. 6.  Claude Levi-Strauss, Elementary Structures of Kinship (London: Eyre and Spottiswode, 1969), p. 496. 7.  Spenser displays the kind of power such a female ruler has in the episode of Malfont, the bad poet, whom Mercilla punishes by having his tongue nailed to a post in Book V. 8.  Louis Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 3–5; and Louis Montrose, “Spenser and the Elizabethan Political Imaginary,” ELH 96 (2002): 907–946.

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9.  See my Incest and Agency in Elizabeth’s England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), pp. 152–163. 10.  Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157–210. 11.  See “La Querelle de la ‘Rose’”: Letters and Documents, North Carolina Studies in Languages and Literatures (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, 1978), p. 138; Le débat sur le “Roman de la rose,” ed. Eric Hicks (Paris: Honoré Chanmpion, 1977), pp. 141–142. 12.  The Livre de la Cité des Dames of Christine de Pizan: A Critical Edition, ed. Maureen Curnow, 2 vols. (PhD. Diss, Vanderbilt University, 1975); Earl Jeffry Richards, trans., The Book of the City of Ladies (New York: Persea Press, 1982), p. 40. 13.  Jacques Derrida analyzes the violence writing does to an oral society in his discussion of girls divulging to Claude Levi-Strauss the names of their tribe, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 101–140. 14.  Allegory, especially pp. 79–81. 15.  Allegory, p. 26. 16.  Jonathan Goldberg, Endlesse Work: Spenser and the Structures of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), p. 11, discusses Amoret’s penetrability. For an immensely intelligent critique of Teskey from the point of view of Spenser’s more positive delineations of allegorical meaning and female agency, see Katherine Eggert “Spenser’s Ravishment: Rape and Rapture in The Faerie Queene,” Representations 70 (2000), 1–26. 17.  Eggert discusses the potential pleasure in Chrysogone’s impregnation and Acrasia’s sexuality, as well as the possible “rapture” when Amoret’s falls free of her bonds after Britomart forces Busyrane to “reverse” his verses, p. 14. 18.  For a fuller discussion of the thematics of childbirth in Britomart’s narrative, see my Incest and Agency, pp. 136–163. 19.  Wroth was famous for both, the twin accomplishments being an important focus of a poem by Lord Herbert of Cherbury: “While other poets can produce ‘feet’ Wroth is able to add toes to them.” See Josephine Roberts, The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth (Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, 1983). 20.  Josephine Roberts, ed., The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995); all citations are to this edition, subsequently cited in the text. 21.  Compare Ferdinand’s baroque keen in The Duchess of Malfi that the image of his sister’s making love to another man will “stick” in his memory, “Till of her bleeding heart I make a sponge/To wipe it out.” 22.  What Wroth has done is to literalize not only the “flames” of passion that “burn” a lover’s heart but also the elaborately celebrated body parts from the tradition of the blason Spenser himself mocks, for instance, in the scene with Serena and the cannibals in Book VI of The Faerie Queene (VI, ix, 39). For a discussion

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of the blason as implicit dismemberment, see Nancy Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” Critical Inquiry 8 (1981), 265–279. 23.  The story of Argalus and Parthenia, the first new story Sidney interpolated into his revised Arcadia, tests male versus female constancy. The story of Parthenia’s disfigurement may be a reference to Sidney’s own mother’s tragic facial scarring by smallpox; her case was so severe that Lady Sidney secluded herself from court. Parthenia’s magical healing may represent the son’s wish to erase his mother’s pain—as well as, of course, to provide the exemplary test case of Argalus’s constancy, when he refuses to accept a perfect look-alike who is not in fact Parthenia herself. For an argument assuming this familial referentiality in the Argalus episode, see Margaret Hannay, Philip’s Phoenix: The Countess of Pembroke (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1990). The possibility that Sidney’s episode is a familial roman à clef (a possibility that could have been assumed, if anywhere, within the Sidney family) would have provided added authority for Wroth’s autobiographical account of her own experiences in the story of Lindamira in the Urania, especially as her story begins with an apparent description of her parents’— Robert Sidney and Barbara Gamage’s—courtship. For a discussion of the parallels see Roberts, pp. 30–31. 24.  Roberts, p. xxxiii. 25.  Lori Humphrey Newcombe argues that Ovid suggests that Pygmalion may have regretted the loss of his masterpiece in “‘If that which is lost be not found’: Monumental Bodies, Spectacular Bodies in The Winter’s Tale” in Ovid and the Renaissance Body, ed. Goran V. Stanivukovic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. 239–259. 26.  Roberts, pp. xx–xxv. 27.  Incest and Agency, pp. 185–191. 28.  Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 1998).

eight

What Knights Really Want stephen orgel

Spenser’s knights never seem to want what they’re supposed to want, a life of action and glory on the battlefield, but keep being distracted by the temptations of art, or love, or a life of ease. I begin with a primal scene of knightly distraction: Near the end of Book 3 of the Faerie Queene, Britomart in the House of Busirane admires a series of tapestries depicting the loves of the gods and the universal triumph of Cupid—the embodiment of love is not Venus but Cupid, and not the modern innocent cherub, but something more like Figure 8.1, the lascivious prepubescent hustler of Caravaggio’s outrageously seductive embodiment of victorious desire. The tapestries constitute a compendious repertory of rampant desire, and though there is a certain amount of moralizing about what a miserable experience love really is, the divine participants do generally get what they want. The human objects of their desire fare less well, but they are, on the whole, willing participants in the various rapes and abductions—thus Ganymede is not urged to resist and preserve his chastity (clearly already lost in Michelangelo’s version, Figure 8.2) but merely to hold on tight; Leda, as in Figure 8.3, only pretends to be asleep as Jove “did her invade,”

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Figure 8.1.  Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Amor as Victor (1602). Oil on canvas, 156 3 113 cm. Inv. 369 Photo: Joerg P. Anders. Gemaeldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany. Photo Credit: Bildarchiv Preussicher Kulturbesltz/Art Resource, NY.

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Figure 8.2.  Michelangelo Buonarroti. GANYMEDE. Black chalk on offwhite antique laid paper; wings of eagle incised with stylus and damaged, parts then retouched; actual: 36.1 3 27 cm (14-3/16 3 10-5/8 in.) Harvard Art Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Gifts for Special Uses Fund, 1955.75. Photo: Allan Macintyre © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

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Figure 8.3.  Michelangelo Buonarroti (after), Leda and the Swan. National Gallery, London, Great Britain. Photo Credit: Alinari/Art Resource, NY. . . . yet twixt her eielids closely spyde How towards her he rusht, and smiled at his pryde; (3.11.32.8–9)1

Daphne, here in Figure 8.4 by Bernini, in perhaps the most startlingly revisionist moment, is faulted for her refusal to be a party to her rape by Apollo: “Lesse she thee lov’d, then was thy just desart” (3.11.36.8). This is Spenser at his most Italian: Ariosto had similarly condemned Daphne to the hell of ungrateful women: “Here Daphne lies that now repents her shunning/ Of Phebus whom she scapt with overrunning,” in Harington’s translation (34.12). Spenser’s voice in describing the tapestries is resolutely amoral. What is more surprising is that Britomart’s reaction, too, is aesthetic rather than moral; she admires and wonders, “Ne seeing could her wonder satisfie” (3.11.49.7). The tapestries, after all, are a celebration of lechery, but the Ovidian exempla do not cause her to trash them as Guyon destroys the

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Figure 8.4.  Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Apollo and Daphne, 3/4 view. Prerestoration. Galleria Borghese, Rome, Italy. Photo Credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

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art of the Bower of Bliss. Perhaps more to the point, they do not cause her to burn in unsatisfied desire, which presumably is the reaction they are intended to elicit. What does provoke that reaction, however, is the sight of Amoret and Scudamore in each other’s arms in the original ending of Book 3: So seemd those two, as growne together quite, That Britomart halfe envying their blesse, Was much empassiond in her gentle sprite, And to her selfe oft wisht like happinesse, In vaine she wisht . . . (3.12. 46.5–9)

“Much empassioned”—she has, after all, been wounded by Busirane, even though she has emerged victorious. The 1596 ending, in which Scudamore has already departed when Britomart emerges with Amoret, spares Britomart the pains of frustrated desire but, in a characteristically Spenserian economy, replaces it with Amoret’s frustrated desire. In most of the tapestry’s examples, lust is the property of a masculine subject, of which women, or occasionally boys, are the object. The difference between Busirane’s pictures and Spenser’s poem, however, is the complicity of the objects of lust: The image of Florimel and the Foster, the chaste, endangered heroine and the lustful attacker, reappears in various forms throughout the Faerie Queene, including at the center of Busirane’s own palace in the person of the captive, wounded, but definitively uncompliant Amoret. Spenserian rapists are invariably failures, and even enchanters cannot compel love. Only the divine lechers depicted in works of art get what they want. But even their success has unwanted consequences: Love both humanizes and unmans them—Mars himself “did shreek,/With womanish teares, and with unwarlike smarts,/Privily moystening his horrid cheek” (3.11.44.5–7). The Ovidian exempla reflect significantly on Gloriana’s knights, for whom eroticism constitutes the prime temptation to give up their quests and renounce the life of action. At the very beginning of the Faerie Queene, the Redcross knight is deflected from his pursuit of the dragon of Original Sin and the liberation of Adam and Eve by Archimago’s simple stratagem of substituting Duessa for Una, a sexually provocative woman “clad in scarlet red” for a cool and virtuous one in black and white who hides her face under a veil. At the poem’s end, Calidore gives up the quest of the Blatant

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Beast in favor of Pastorella—pastoral love, reversing the Virgilian topos, constitutes the end of epic. In this case there is no suggestion that Pastorella is anything less than virtuous; but she implicates the erotics of the poem in a large structural ambivalence because all the quests are ultimately quests for love; the projected end of all the poem’s adventures is marriage beneath the benevolent aegis of the Fairy Queen. Even Guyon, the only one of the knights not provided with a lady, serves Gloriana; and how far the queen’s service extended was always an open question, as the recurrent rumor that Elizabeth had had a child by Leicester indicates. Duessa may deflect the Redcross Knight from Una, but both women represent the end of knightly action; and when the Redcross Knight bolts from his wedding party declaring that he won’t be ready to go to bed with Una for another seven years, he is making clear just how conclusive an ending love constitutes. It doesn’t really matter whether the woman is good or bad, a lecherous mistress or a chaste wife. In Spenser’s celebration of his own marriage, the Epithalamion, he assures the success of his love by analogizing himself to Jove; but even within sight of the altar, the king of heaven remains the irresistible polymorph of Busirane’s tapestries: Spenser’s analogy for his bride is not the regal Juno, who after all is patron of marriage, but Maia or Alcmena; the divine, the poetic, model for wedlock is rape, or adultery. Or, alternatively, total disaster: The bride is also compared to Medusa, the beautiful Gorgon transformed by the experience of love into the monster whose very look causes impotence. In fact, in Spenser’s England, removing one’s armor and opting out of the chivalric life is always an ambiguous matter; the temptation to effeminacy is on the one hand very bad and dangerous, but it can also, paradoxically, represent everything one wants, the highest good. Lord Herbert of Cherbury in Figure 8.5 reclines in a wood, while his discarded armor is hung on a tree by a squire whose head is completely obliterated by the extraordinary red plume of his master’s helmet. Herbert retains only his shield, which depicts his heart in flames and the motto Magica Sympathiae, “sympathetic magic,” as he ascends, with his heart, from the world of action to that of contemplative philosophy. Or so I assume: There is no evident love interest in the picture, though the flaming heart must at least analogize what Herbert really wants, the passion of love. It is surely to the point that this is the principal mode of desire, even of the most passionately chaste and holy desire, such as that of Ber-

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Figure 8.5.  Isaac Oliver, Edward Herbert, First Lord of Cherbury. Powis Castle, The Clive Collection (The National Trust). © NTPL/John Hammond/Powis Estate Trustees.

nini’s Saint Teresa in Figure 8.6, about to be entered by the shaft of divine love. Donne goes so far as to demand to be sodomized by the very physical God who has been battering his heart: “I/Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free,/Nor ever chast, except you ravish me” (Holy Sonnets 10).2 The paradox is embodied in the trope itself: Lust is a consuming passion, but the rapist is thereby represented as acted on, not acting. Bernini’s Apollo in the Apollo and Daphne is definitively the aggressor, but in Spenser’s account of the inner life of the pair, the woman is the active and destructive one: “Fayre Daphne Phœbus heart with love did gore” (2.12.52.5). Still, the problem with knights who undress is not that they are becoming amorous. Figure 8.7 is Captain Thomas Lee without his trousers. This is not an announcement of the abandonment of his military career for an

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Figure 8.6.  Gian Lorenzo Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. Close-up. Cornaro Chapel, S. Maria della Vittoria, Rome, Italy. Photo Credit: Scala/Art Resource, NY.

amatory, or even for a hermetic life—though he seems absurdly vulnerable, he is nevertheless amply furnished with shield, helmet, and weapons; what he wears, all the art historians assure us, is Irish military dress (a similarly costumed figure appears in Boissard as “Hibernus Miles,” an Irish soldier),

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Figure 8.7.  Marcus Gheeraerts II, Portrait of Captain Thomas Lee (1594). Tate Gallery, London, Great Britain. Photo Credit: Tate, London/Art ­Resource, NY.

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Figure 8.8.  Hans Holbein The Elder, An Allegory of Passion (c. 1532–1536), medium size. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

and it is seriously claimed that Lee has removed his pants so that they won’t get dirty in the Irish bogs—the ultimate pastoral motive. This may, of course, reflect on Spenser’s sense of his own exile in Ireland while he was writing the poem—all Spenser’s knights are, in a sense, Irish. In any case, Captain Lee is certainly not preparing for sex. Potential rapists in Spenser, as in Holbein’s allegory of Desire in Figure 8.8, tend to be chronically on the run, and on horseback, and to remain there until they are unhorsed by other men, not by catching their prey. Unarmed knights like Lord Herbert, in fact, constitute in themselves a temptation: Britomart removing her hel-

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met to reveal her hair is of course a special case, but men in various degrees of nakedness are represented throughout the poem not as a threat to women but as their prey; and here it is worth looking closely at both what men want from the women they lust after and what women want from the men they have succeeded in captivating. Consider Cymochles in the Bower of Bliss. Acrasia provides for his entertainment (2.5.28) with both loose ladies and lascivious boys—Bronzino, in Figure 8.9, is our touchstone now, though the boys stop being mentioned almost at once: Perhaps those inviting rear ends really are more than ­Spenser can handle. Cymochles initially seems in his element, “given all to lust and loose living,” and the dissolute damzels “every of them strove with most delights,/Him to aggrate and greatest pleasures shew” (33)—but “show” turns out to be the operative concept: Instead of an endless series of infinitely inventive lovers producing countless wonderful orgasms, Cymochles wants no action at all: He, like an Adder, lurking in the weedes His wandring thought in deepe desire does steepe, And his frayle eye with spoyle of beauty feedes; Sometimes he falsely faines himself to sleep, Whiles through their lids his wanton eies do peepe, To steale a snatch of amorous conceipt, Whereby close fire into his heart does creepe: So, he them deceives, deceivd in his deceipt, Made dronke with drugs of deare voluptuous receipt. (2.5.34)

What is the point of the deception; why all the lurking? The sex workers are only out to please him: Surely this is a case where the knight really can have anything he wants. So is this what knights really want? To be able to look secretly from a distance at half-naked women and lascivious boys while pretending to be asleep? Who’s doing what to whom? Adders do, after all, eventually strike; but by the stanza’s end Cymochles is no adder, “deceivd in his deceipt,/Made dronke with drugs . . .” As a matter of fact, Cymochles is uncharacteristic in that he at least remains awake, only pretending to be unconscious. For the most part knights who fall for seductive ladies simply fall asleep: Here, in Botticelli’s Mars and Venus (Figure 8.10), we are obviously witnessing the pair after their

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Figure 8.9  Agnolo Bronzino, Cupid, Venus, Folly and Time. An Allegory with Venus and Cupid (c. 1540–1550). Inv. NG651. National Gallery, London, Great Britain. Photo credit: Art Resource/National Gallery, London, Great Britain.

lovemaking is over. Mars is exhausted, and Venus takes the opportunity to disarm him. The Samson and Delilah story preaches a similar moral. But Acrasia actually takes her sexual pleasure while her lover is sound asleep, as Van Dyck’s Armida does with Rinaldo in Figure 8.11,

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Figure 8.10.  Sandro Botticelli, Venus and Mars. National Gallery, London, Great Britain. Photo Credit: Art Resource, NY.

Figure 8.11.  Sir Anthony Van Dyck, Flemish, 1599–1641. Rinaldo and ­Armida, 1629. Oil on canvas, 93 3 90 in. The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Jacob Epstein Collection BMA 1951.103.

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. . . greedily depasturing delight: And oft inclining downe with kisses light, For feare of waking him, his lips bedewd, And through his humid eyes did sucke his spright, Quite molten into lust and pleasure lewd. (2.12.73.4–8)

Spenser says this scene takes place “after long wanton joys,” but how much better than “quite molten into lust and pleasure lewd” does sex get when you’re awake? In most versions of the Venus and Adonis story, as in Titian’s in Figure 8.12, Adonis is a singularly active youth, though in Shakespeare and Ti­tian the action extends to hunting but not to sex. But when Spenser’s Venus seduces Adonis, he is asleep at least half the time: “him to sleepe she gently would perswade,/Or bathe him in a fountaine by some covert glade.” The other half, when he is awake and with his clothes off,

Figure 8.12.  Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Venus and Adonis. The Jules Bache Collection, 1949 (49.7.16). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA. Image Copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY.

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. . . whilst he bath’d . . . , She secretly would search each daintie lim, . . . And ever with sweet Nectar she did sprinkle him. So did she steale his heedless hart away, And joyd his love in secret unespyde, (3.1.35–7)

which in the context seems to mean unespied by him. Why all the secrecy? Lust so configured is essentially a solitary activity, with its object unaware or simply insensible. Even in the Garden of Adonis, freed from the dangers of traditional masculine activity, with the boar safely “emprisoned for ay,” Adonis remains the passive partner: There wont fayre Venus often to enjoy Her deare Adonis joyous company, And reape sweet pleasure of the wanton boy: There yet, some say, in secret he does ly, Lapped in flowres and precious spycery . . . But she her selfe, whenever that she will, Possesseth him, and of his sweetnesse takes her fill. (3.6.46)

It would appear, therefore, that when Malecasta, after her extended flirtation with Britomart, creeps into bed with her sleeping houseguest, she really does get what she wants: . . . to her bed approaching, first she proov’d, Whether she slept or wakte, with her softe hand She softely felt, if any member moov’d . . . Which whenas none she fond, with easy shifte, . . . by her side her selfe she softly layd, . . . ne word she spake, But inly sigh’d. (3.1.60)

Britomart then awakes, but surely too late: That inward sigh reveals that Malecasta has already satisfied her lust—she has, in fact, got what all the other unchaste ladies in the poem want, a sleeping lover. Britomart, now wide awake, “to her weapon ran, in minde to gride/The loathed leachour,” and the other knights enter to find her holding her “avenging blaed” over her swooning and utterly unthreatening hostess (3.1.62–63).

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If the scene were in Ariosto, it would be comic, and the knights would dissolve in laughter; but Spenser isn’t out for laughs. Britomart’s militant outrage indicates not simply that Malecasta has mistaken her quarry, but that something sexually dangerous has in fact happened, something that ends with Britomart pierced by Gardante’s arrow, so “That drops of purple blood thereout did weepe,/Which did her lilly smock with staines of vermeil steepe” (65). This sounds like a defloration; and surely it implies at the very least that some kind of innocence is gone—Britomart is wounded and stained, as she is to be again by Busirane. Earlier in the book, in one of Spenser’s zanier moments, Britomart is praised for not accompanying Guyon and Timias in aid of the distressed Florimel: “fair Britomart, whose constant mind/Would not so lightly follow beauties chace,/Ne reckt of Ladies Love, did stay behynd” (3.1.19). In light of her panic (or of Spenser’s) at finding Malecasta in bed with her, perhaps the point really is just what it seems so anachronistically to be: She is being praised for the fact that she “ne reckt of Ladies Love,” for not being lesbian, as if this were something unusual in the poem. But if ladies’ love isn’t a problem for her, why the panic, and why the wound? The only dramatically significant one of the very few women in Spenser who actually want and get genital sex with men who are awake is Hellenore, in Book 3, Cantos 9 and 10. (Radigund says she wants it, but it doesn’t get her anywhere; it only produces a sleeping lover for her maid.) It is certainly made clear that the problem with her husband Malbecco is not primarily that he is old, ugly, horrible, jealous, and a miser, but that he does not satisfy her sexually; and her ultimate retreat, via Paridell, to a community of satyrs is represented as an arrangement that really does make her happy. This is the closest Spenser comes to a scene of genital sex: As Malbecco watches, Hellenore . . . emongst them lay, Embracèd of a Satyre rough and rude, Who all the night did minde his joyous play: Nine times he heard him come aloft ere day, That all his hart with jealousy did swell. (3.10.48.2–6)

(This is an earlier sexual use of come than the OED’s earliest citation, from one of Percy’s ballads, c. 1650: s.v. 17.)

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Malbecco undertakes to reclaim his wife with some powerful Spenserian rhetoric—the same rhetoric, indeed, with which Malecasta and Acrasia have been condemned: Tho gan he her perswade, to leave that lewd And loathsom life, of God and man abhord, And home returne, where all should be renewd With perfect peace, and bandes of fresh accord . . . But she it all refused at one word . . . But chose emongst the jolly Satyres still to wonne. (3.10.51)

This is a remarkably unambiguous conclusion. I suggest, however, that, as the classical and Italian names, the fabliau form, the satyrs, and especially the uniqueness of the sex in the poem make clear, for Spenser it constitutes a foreign and basically unworkable solution to an English problem—find yourself a sexually active man who likes going to bed with you; or if you are a man, find yourself a woman or a lascivious boy who doesn’t put you to sleep. Isaac Oliver provides a striking parallel in the astonishing drawing in Figure 8.13, unique in both his oeuvre and in Elizabethan England: active men (those jolly satyrs) and women being pleased. The native ­English

Figure 8.13.  Isaac Oliver, Nymphs and Satyrs, c. 1605–1610. The Royal Collection © 2009, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

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Figure 8.14.  Isaac Oliver, Allegory of Unchaste Love. Statens museum for Kunst, Copenhagen. Photo Credit: SMK Foto.

s­ olution is depicted in this equally extraordinary, and equally unique, Oliver miniature in Figure 8.14. In the background, men pursue a life of action: Hunters spear a boar and shoot ducks; a falconer’s hawk catches a cormorant on the wing. In the courtly erotic scene in the right foreground, however, it is the women who are active, while the men are languid and passive: This is love in the Bower of Bliss. In the left foreground, in contrast, three soberly dressed women, a lady and her two maids, are chaperoned by a man. Their dress identifies them as city folk, not courtiers; and they observe the erotic scene, of which they seem to disapprove. But can we really tell the good women from the bad? The courtesans are clearly licentious, with bare breasts and filmy garments, their clothing a striking contrast to that of the city women: The mistress in the left foreground wears a sober black overgarment with a high neck, white ruff and lace cuffs, a russet skirt, a black hat. But now look at the lady engaged in the love scene immediately behind the moralizing group: black overgarment, high neck, white ruff and lace cuffs, russet skirt, black hat. She is indistinguishable in dress and features from the standing moralist—as indistinguishable as Florimel is from the False Florimel: Are they, perhaps, even the same person? When this picture was most recently exhibited in London, at

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the Dynasties exhibition at the Tate in 2002, the art historians had finally noticed this subversive little pair. The catalogue entry suggests that “the embracing couple on the ground . . . may be a mother and son, who represent maternal love.” But this is surely pure desperation: The only reason to call this maternal love is that art history believes that women dressed in black cannot be interested in sex. But the courtesan gestures back toward the city lovers: Look, they do it, too—Così fan tutte. What do knights really want? The standard Spenserian temptation is to abandon chivalric action in favor of sex; but sex turns out to be not another kind of action, the rampant potency of Paridell and the satyrs, but utter passivity: The ideal is to be doted on while sleeping, or worse, feigning sleep. This is obviously why Spenserian eroticism is so bad and disabling, and so central a model for the corruption of chivalry; the question, however, that goes to the heart of Spenser’s psychopathology, is why it should be a model of sex. Notes 1.  Quotations from The Faerie Queene are from the edition of A. C. Hamilton (Longman, 2007). The letters u and v have been normalized. 2.  The text is that of Helen Gardner, Divine Poems of John Donne (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1964).

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Eliding Absence and Regaining Presence The Materialist Allegory of Good and Evil in Bacon’s Fables and Milton’s Epic catherine gimelli martin

As most allegorists have long been aware, Walter Benjamin’s most signal contribution to the theory of allegory was to reject the German Romantic aesthetics of the symbol followed by most mainline English critics from Coleridge onward. In this enduring Romantic and post-Romantic tradition, the symbol had been to allegory as presence is to absence: As the symbol’s inferior mental “supplement,” the allegorical sign pointed toward an essential “Being” it did not share. The symbol, by contrast, actually partook of its transcendental object either aurally, visually, or both. Benjamin’s reversal of this logocentric assumption not only anticipated Derrida’s famous critique of Rousseau’s elevation of “ineffable” speech over the written sign in Of Grammatology, but at the same time recuperated the “fallen,” postsacramental sign system of “ruined” allegory. This late allegorical mode was the by-product of Protestant iconoclasm’s gradual subjection of all visible signs of transcendent truth to the skepticism with which they regarded the Catholic miracle of transubstantiation. Among English writers, Benjamin found this skepticism most clearly epitomized in Shakespeare, especially in Hamlet. Here the tragic hero embarks on a famously failed quest for tan-

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gible proof of his father’s murder, a quest that Stephen Greenblatt directly links to the loss of transubstantiation.1 More generally, Hamlet’s inability utterly to separate guilt from innocence in Claudius, his possible accomplices, himself, or even his murdered father recapitulates the linguistic divide that Shakespeare and his contemporaries linked to the original fall of man. Foreshadowing the second fall of language at Babel, Adam’s lapse not only initiated a tragic divorce of words from things but, as Donne famously lamented, made the first marriage “our funeral.” Yet other seventeenth-century thinkers took a considerably less pessimistic approach to the fall, one that virtually erased the unbridgeable gulf that Donne’s First Anniversarie places between Adam’s pre- and postlapsarian condition.2 Francis Bacon’s reinterpretation of Genesis influenced an entire new generation who would argue (as Milton does in his Areopagitica) that our exile from Eden is ultimately reversible, that the dividing line between guilt and innocence has always been “fruitfully” ambiguous, and that slippery verbal signifiers are neither fatal nor limited to postlapsarian existence.3 Truth rightly has “more shapes then one,” and her temple— which Milton claimed was rapidly being rebuilt in England—is not ideally seamless.4 Paradise Lost continues this linguistic line of thought by refusing to identify closure with Eden or confusion exclusively with Chaos or hell. As Victoria Kahn observes, the poem not only inverts the traditional opposition between paradise and open-endedness but makes the boundless sphere that “Christianity has traditionally marked with the fall” into the essence of Eden. This inversion is the ultimate result of Milton’s “free will” argument, which both Kahn and Blair Hoxby directly link to Bacon’s promotion of the free circulation and testing of new ideas as the only remedy for humankind’s impaired “estate.”5 Yet Milton critics still tend to ignore how radically this reversal of older assumptions about openness and closure erases the old gap between presence and absence in the “ruined allegory” of Paradise Lost, which additionally alters its representation of good and evil.6 Clinging to the standard assumption that Milton’s Sin is a metaphysical “nothing” as in Saint Augustine (where sin is the mere “privation” of the good) further obscures how Bacon’s revival of animist materialism contributes to these alterations. Even critics who focus on the new materialism fail to perceive how animism radically transforms Milton’s Sin and Death. Gaining a complex dynamics and a genealogy utterly lacking in Spenser’s Errour, they share many key characteristics with the allegorical personae who in both Bacon’s Advancement of Learning and The Wisdom

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of the ­Ancients not only symbolize physical forces but often “embody” the living presence of matter. Yet Stephen Fallon is hardly alone in confining Milton’s atomism to the material world created by God and consigning degenerate “beings” like Sin and Death to nonentity.7 In what follows, we will see that Sin and Death’s effects on the real world are every bit as real and lasting as they are in ours, where evil (pain, fear, loss, and so forth) is no mere “nothing” with no lasting consequences. In failing to return to the absence out of which the traditional Christian God creates everything, Sin and Death inhabit a complex amalgam of presence and absence in an epic where not even “the Spirits damn’d/Lose all thir virtue.” Here evil not only partakes of the good, but good can be distinguished from “close ambition varnish’d o’er with zeal” only by trial and error (PL 2.482–485).8 In essence, this means that Areopagitica’s “mixed” description of our postlapsarian state also applies to the prelapsarian worlds of heaven and Eden: Good and evill we know in the field of this World grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involv’d and interwoven with the knowledge of evill, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discern’d, that those confused seeds which were impos’d on Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixt. It was from out the rinde of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evill as two twins cleaving together leapt forth into the World. And perhaps this is that doom which the Adam fell into of knowing good and evill, that is to say of knowing good by evill. As therefore the state of man now is; what wisdome can there be to choose, what continence to forbeare without the knowledge of evill? (CPW 2:514)

Although Satan has no prior knowledge of evil when he first consorts with Sin in heaven, his experience of her “cunning” resemblance to truth and beauty is essentially the same as Adam’s because Milton never argues here or elsewhere that good can only be known by evil, as the medieval theory of the “fortunate fall” taught.9 On the contrary, while the “twins” of sinful and innocent desire are eerily similar, they are ultimately distinguishable by the light of reason alone. Reason is thus “but choosing” the less sinister course of trusting one’s Maker, who in turn entrusts his creatures with the gift of free will. Without it, God would have created “a meer artificiall Adam,” not an independent subject “free . . . [to seize] a provoking object, ever almost in his eyes; [for] herein consisted his merit, herein the right of his reward, the praise of his abstinence” (CPW 2:527). Paradise

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Lost illustrates Milton’s ongoing belief that both freedom and right reason can be maintained only by refusing to turn the “provoking object” into an idol. Eve fails this test not merely by eating an apple but by turning it into an idol of power she cannot live without. Kenneth Gross usefully defines this all-too-human tendency as the “ironic twin” of rational or provident choice, a selfish desire “to subject a life other than its own to the reductions of idolatry,” or objectification. Its positive twin, the opposite of turning living things into reified objects, consists in endowing dead things with psychic life and thereby emulating a Creator for whom all life is a “thou,” not an “it” or an object. Gross’s analysis clearly draws both on Martin Buber and on Bacon’s most undisputed philosophical heir, Giovanni Battista Vico, in explaining Spenser’s understanding of idolatry, and it is equally clear that Milton is indebted to both Bacon and Spenser. All three show that no “single act of iconoclasm [can] ever finally cut off the proliferating magical error of idolatry.”10 Nevertheless, Bacon’s Advancement of Learning more profoundly influenced Milton than Spenser because it alone questions and revises the traditional interpretation of Adam’s fall. Disconnecting it from “knowing” in the simple biblical sense of aspiring to forbidden knowledge, Bacon actually argues that God’s “commandments or prohibitions were not the originals of good and evil” at all. The causes of Adam’s transgression were more complex than that because both sin and innocence are contingent on what knowledge means to the seeker. In itself, “natural knowledge” was never forbidden, so God’s interdiction on the apple must have constituted a test of obedience, not a decree of perpetual ignorance. By failing this test Adam and Eve chose “to make a total defection from God, and to depend wholly upon” themselves, thereby gaining a forbidden and unfortunate knowledge of moral evil, not any truly desirable wisdom. They did gain the capacity to decide right and wrong for themselves, but they also lost the integrity needed to decide correctly or unselfishly. This choice was obviously an ethical rather than an empirical mistake, as shown by Adam’s earlier, innocent inquiries into the nature of the “creatures, and the imposition of names” on them. That knowledge was also properly godlike, a just reflection of the ­divine image in Adam (cf. PL 4.288–293) rather than an unjust usurpation of divine prerogative. Only the latter act impaired the imago dei, right reason, by denying the Creator’s rightful position as moral architect and lawgiver. By violating his sole “covenant” or requirement to accept the gift of paradise in return for a single fruit, Adam and Eve nevertheless did more

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damage to their moral judgment than to their material ability to fulfill the original command to inquire into nature and to “dress and keep” their garden.11 That capacity was clearly retained both by our “Grand Parents” and by all their heirs. Bacon’s careful distinctions not only draw a much thinner line between forbidden and unfallen knowledge than the earlier Christian tradition admitted but makes sin less the result of what one knows than of how and why one knows it. While attempting to penetrate the rationale behind God’s absolute moral imperatives is always evil, objectively or abstractly knowing anything else—including, as Areopagitica argues, the physical nature and consequences of evil—is not. Even human language remained essentially unfallen once Bacon eliminated the ancient platonic divide between philosophy and rhetoric, or true “knowing” and false linguistic embellishment. In his view, both philosophy and rhetoric can lead to truth or falsehood because both are forms of verbal experimentation needed to sift true from false knowledge. Thus rhetoric “can be no more charged with the colouring of the worst part, than Logic with Sophistry, or Morality with Vice. For we know the doctrines of contraries are the same, though the use be opposite” (Works 3:411). This means, in essence, that not our methods but only their results, the uses to which they are put, determine right or wrong. Milton supports these distinctions when he reveals the cause of Satan’s fall into evil, which, as the latter admits, is not the possession of too much or too little knowledge but rather a willful blindness to God’s creative capacities and tangible gifts (PL 4:3170).. That distinction allows both the unfallen and the fallen Adam to pursue sinless inquiries into matters classified as “forbidden knowledge” as recently as Marlowe’s composition of Doctor Faustus. In the process, the great Augustinian divide between angelic presence or “fullness of being” and human deficiency or lack is largely overcome.12 Here, as in The Advancement of Learning, the “light whereof man did give names unto other creatures in Paradise” exemplifies the “pure knowledge of nature and universality” God intended for all his creatures, human and angelic alike. Knowledge even constitutes the highest possible form of divine worship (Works 3:264, PL 3:693–704), for, as Bacon insists, truly to reflect the Creator and the glory of his creation requires an endless and infinite exploration of his kingdom: Salomon . . . affirmeth that the eye is never satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing; and if there be no fullness, then is the continent greater

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than the content: so of knowledge itself and the mind of man, whereto the senses are but reporters . . . not only delighted in beholding the variety of things and vicissitude of times, but raised also to find out and discern the ordinances and decrees which through all these changes are infallibly observed. (Works 3:265)

Discerning God’s “ordinances and decrees” thus means that “knowledge is power,” as Bacon famously proclaimed, but no longer in a sinister sense. Because our understanding is perverted only when we try to do the impossible—to become the boundless godhead himself—“sin” is now limited to violent or deluded usurpations of divine wisdom and moral prerogative. So long as we avoid the delusions of wrongful pride, “sinful” human aspiration ceases to exist. Aspiration in itself can still be evil, good, or neutral, but its evil aspects are largely confined to ethical overreaching. The same applies to the means of gaining knowledge, which are no longer neatly divided on pre- and postlapsarian lines and generally incline more toward the good. Yet, while Bacon thereby expands the realm of innocence, the realm of evil is also expanded once humans gain an inalienable capacity to construct “authentic” other selves susceptible to self-worship and idolatry. Satan, Adam, and Eve all suffer from this fate after they seize God’s rightful place and materially alter their spiritual and physical condition. Nevertheless, as Bacon teaches, even this alternation is materially reparable. Satan first recognizes this fact on Mount Niphates (PL 4.91–94), where he comes close to repentance and (had he succeeded in repenting) redemption. Here, as throughout Milton’s epic, God’s “permissive will” (PL 3.685) makes such “soul-building” choices inevitable as creaturely processes of speech participate in the processes of creation (PL 7.178). Both Bacon and Milton construct this free-will theology on a Hebraic rather than an Augustinian or Greek understanding of sin. No longer a deeply mysterious “lapse” from a passive fullness of being, like both free will and good works, sin is as active and creative as integrity or obedience. Gross traces the Hebraic understanding of sin to the Jewish appraisal of the pagan idols, which Bacon in turn follows in his own theory of the Idols. According to this Hebraic tradition, “The dead or never living idol that is no-thing is also the vessel of the freedom, the violence, and the stress of the human imagination in search of its gods.” Although an idol may be simply vacant, as the pagan gods were for Augustine, it may also contain sacred or true images “reduced to mechanism, a mystery become a temporal institution subject to the rule of a selfish priesthood” or narcissistic self.13 The

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New Testament preserves this Hebraic understanding of idolatry, when it explains how temptation allures its victim with “his own lust” that, when fertile, “conceives” and brings forth the actual “body” of sin, which is death (James 1:13–15). If this account is taken literally, lust materially engenders a newly sinful and deadly being, but not automatically. At one point in its evolution, the fallen state remains reversible because being “enticed” is not the same as either “seizing on” or “conceiving” sin or death. Both Milton’s “yet sinless” Adam and Eve clearly recognize this fact after Eve dreams a sinfully tempting dream implanted in her vital spirits by Satan. The awakened Adam then comforts her by saying that her very abhorrence of this vision means that it has come and gone “without spot or blame” (PL 5.119). Both next call on God to disperse “aught of evil” the dream contained “as now light dispels the dark” (PL 5. 207–208), and he graciously responds by sending Raphael, who helps Eve understand (as she later informs Adam) that temptation in itself . . . precedes not sin: only our Foe Tempting affronts us with his foul esteem Of our integrity; his foul esteem Sticks no dishonor on our Front, but turns Foul on himself; then wherefore shunn’d or fear’d By us? (PL 9.327–332)

This passage is usually (and rightly) connected to Milton’s Areopagitican claim that that “which purifies us is triall, and triall is by what is contrary” to innocence, although, in retrospect, Eve should have been more fearful of the attractions of idolatry. Yet the passage is not correctly connected to the idea that sin is a mere “nothing.” Eve rightly rejects “unexercis’d” and spotless notions of purity (CPW 2:515) because virtue and vice are interdependent and interactive, not absolute opposites, which means that resisting the latter strengthens the former. The process also works in reverse, so that even after Adam and Eve fall into sin and death, repentance and good works prevent them and their world from declining into absolute perversion. Instead, they are punished with “a long day’s dying” into a material dust whose atoms can create renewed life in a restored paradise (PL 10.964).14 In the meantime, the human interaction with nature remains ambiguously susceptible of producing good or evil depending on the motivations behind human invention, as the contrast between the Sons of Seth and Daughters

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of Cain later shows. Bacon anticipates this allegorical passage by affirming that the lovers of truth command nature by obeying her (Works 4:47), while her false philosophers or “lovers” subject her to the status of a concubine or second-class “mate.” Like Milton’s Sin, these mates at first appear beautiful, but their mistreatment creates an imbalance that ultimately recoils on their masters.15 For both Milton and Bacon, this potential for corruption cannot be removed from sexual, philosophical, or natural knowledge, from which it may spread into matter’s infinitely malleable forms. Originating in the formless Chaos that both adapt from Lucretius and the Greek mythographers, matter is thus not a dead but a living force that never loses its capacity for vital transformation, positive or negative.16

b a c o n ’s f a b l e s a n d m i l t o n ’s c o s m o s Bacon’s two fables of “Cupid, or the Atom,” and of “Coelum, or the Origin of Things” in The Wisdom of the Ancients seem most directly to have influenced Milton’s rejection of Augustine’s ex nihilo creation theory, a philosophical by-product of the platonic view of matter as something inherently unclean, godless, and devoid of spirit (Timaeus 30a). Bacon’s “demiurge,” Cupid, overcomes the isolation of spirit from matter by participating with Coelum, the primordial material principle also known as Ouranos, or the formless heavens, in creating order from chaos. Milton’s Son does much the same thing when he creates our universe from the “void and formless” atoms of Chaos (PL 3.12), the primal space from which a new cosmos arises on the brink of the same “heav’nly shore” (PL 7.210) that expelled Satan. Separating “first” or fully atomic matter from its chaotic substrate, the Son’s “great divorcing command” (CPW 2: 273) thrusts the “infernal dregs” of preatomic life back into the infinite abyss of Chaos (PL 7:225–242). Yet, as in Bacon’s fable, these chaotic dregs do not actually dissolve into dungeonlike inactivity but remain in a “place of perturbation” midway between heaven and Earth. Here “fragility or mortality and corruption have their chief cooperation” unless the creator-Cupid reorders them (Bacon, Works 6:724). He does this by infusing chaotic particles with the same vital energy that Milton ascribes to “Light/Ethereal, first of things, quintessence pure/Sprung from the Deep” (PL 7.243–245). Milton’s Light and the Son thus share the creative powers Bacon gives to Cupid, and as in his fables, Chaos remains profoundly ambiguous, at once the “Womb of nature and

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perhaps her Grave” (PL 2.911). Yet in neither case is this ongoing source of both creation and destruction either unclean or innately distinct from “pure” matter. Milton emphasizes the continuities between Chaos and creation by showing that light itself possesses a “dark Nativity” and malleability not unlike the unformed particles of Chaos (PL 6.478–487). Like Bacon’s “notable commotions in the heavenly regions,” its formless realm is also fruitful because its ambiguity permits “the power of the Sun” (or Son) to restore the order temporarily lost as “inundations, tempests, winds, earthquakes” shake the lower or chaotic levels of the universe. After these periodic but inevitable inundations, Bacon assures his readers that both the higher and lower regions settle into a “more durable state of consent and harmonious operation” (Works 6:724). Again, much the same thing occurs in Milton’s epic after the War in Heaven: Creative order succeeds destructive strife without completely supplanting it, for, as Bacon explains, cosmic matter was never (as Aristotle falsely taught) innately inclined to “privation” or rest (Works 6:729–730). Milton’s antiprelatical and divorce tracts earlier endorse similar ideas: Material life demands a “struggle of contrarieties” common to all “elementall and mixt things,” which “cannot suffer any change of one kind, or quality into another without” it (CPW 1:795). Even heavenly matter undergoes strife, for there as everywhere, life springs from a periodic contest of concord and discord, love and hate (CPW 2.272). Thus in heaven, as on Earth, evil is primarily an organic imbalance in the hateful direction, although its periods of perversion at once dissipate and renew all things (PL 10.616–640), for, without contraries, nothing exists. Bacon expands on this cosmic paradigm in his famous fable of Pan, or Nature, commonly regarded as the most important chapter of his hugely popular Wisdom of the Ancients. Integrating three different yet equally “true” traditions about Pan’s origins, Bacon makes his “all-god” represent the entire span of nature from heavenly balance to destructive strife (Works 6:711). His fable opens with the speculation that Pan may be either “the offspring of Mercury—that is of the Divine Word (an opinion which the Scriptures establish beyond question, and which was entertained by all the more divine philosophers); or else of the seeds of things mixed and confused together,” as “Virgil sang.” Never a slave to either/or logic, Bacon decides that both traditions possess elements of truth, which seems to explain why Milton gives both the Word or Son and Chaos important roles in creation. Bacon then recounts a third or purely postlapsarian interpretation of Pan as “the state of

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the world, not at its very birth, but as it was after the fall of Adam, subject to death and corruption.” He decides that this myth must refer to Pan’s tragic rebirth as the joint “offspring of God and Sin”; but, even in that form, he retains his roots in “the Divine Word” that created him “through the medium of confused matter (which is itself God’s creature).” Nevertheless, after “sin and corruption enter” into nature (Works 6:709), Pan takes on the “new nature” that Milton ascribes to his chief allegorical personae, Sin and her son Death (PL 10:706–719), a contaminated nature limited only by the force that Bacon identifies with Pan’s sisters, the Fates. By measuring “the births and durations and deaths of all things,” they conserve the cosmos by decreeing that it will eventually return to its unfallen state. Milton follows suit when he shows that the God whose “will is Fate” (PL 7.173) will never permit natural depravity to become total: Sin and Death will die either temporarily or forever (Works 6:709–710, PL 10. 616–640). Bacon mythically associates this divine promise with the image of Pan’s horns: “Broad at bottom and narrow at top,” they illustrate “the fact that the whole frame of nature rises to a point like a pyramid” eventually touching heaven because “the summits, or universal forms, of nature do in a manner reach up to God” (Works 6:710). Pan’s horns also symbolize the entire “body of nature,” which “is most truly described as biform,” for, as Milton says, only God himself is single and “alone/From all Eternity” (PL 8.405–406). Bacon locates the difference between nature and God in the “very ingenious allegory involved in that attribute of the goat’s feet,” its split hoof, which allows the half-animal, half-divine goat-god to represent the paradoxical unity and division of the lower and higher species. The goat also represents the creaturely ability to climb upward toward the stars or downward “to the lower world” like the “body” of nature itself (Works 6:710–711). The body of Milton’s “one first matter” behaves in precisely the same way, evolving and devolving through an integrated life chain of lower and higher forms. Here “all things proceed” from and return to God “if not deprav’d from good” (PL 5. 470–471), as they dynamically climb from matter’s dark root to its symbolic “green stalk, from thence the leaves/ More aery, last the bright consummate flow’r/Spirits odorous breathes” (PL 5. 479–482). Milton also alludes to Bacon’s “primal” Pan as the essence of Eden’s unfallen nature: In paradise the “Universal Pan/Knit with the ­Graces and Hours in dance/Led on th’ Eternal Spring” of natural re­newal (PL 4:266–668). Like Bacon’s first state of nature, this one is tragically doomed to destruction yet not beyond the possibility of repair.

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The many editions of Bacon’s Wisdom of the Ancients gloss other closely related myths about nature’s “confused” but reparable state, consistently teaching that natural mutability does not indicate an irreversible “Donnean” decline because conflict is inherent in creation. Milton early supported this claim in his Latin poem, Naturam Non Pati Senium (“Nature is Not Subject to Old Age”), which describes “decay theory” as one of the persistent “errors by which the wandering mind of man is . . . overwearied” and darkened (1–2, Hughes’s translation). While not adopting Bacon’s device of using Pan’s pipes and sheep-hook or staff as evidence of the divine promise that natural harmony will always triumph over destructive strife, Milton’s poem similarly argues that “by founding the stars more strongly” than the shades of “Stygian Dis,” the “omnipotent Father . . . has fixed the scales of fate with sure balance and commanded every individual thing in the cosmos to hold to its course forever” (31, 33–36). As in Bacon, there are intermittent “commotions” in the heavens (ll.16–32) that will return at the Last Day; but, in the meantime, “the elements do not vary from their faith” despite the shock of lightening bolts, storms, and harsh seasons (51–55). Bacon finds these natural variations symbolized in Pan’s staff, which like “eternal” nature can never be “straightened,” for “all the works of Divine Providence in the world are wrought by winding and roundabout ways” that the human race must imitate in order to be repaired. Here Bacon’s idiosyncratic synthesis of “straight and crooked” distantly recalls the “mazy error” of Milton’s Eden (PL 4.239), whose irregularly wandering paths are not only innocent but beneficent.17 Designed to accommodate curious gardeners who seek winding but sinless knowledge, Eden ironically prepares Adam and Eve for the trackless wilderness they must enter after their fall. Bacon further strains his allegory to make a similar point about the shepherd-god Pan, who, as the “god of hunters,” was the first deity to point the path to recovery. He did this by discovering Proserpina’s lost and distraught mother Ceres while out hunting. As in Naturam Non Pati Senium (10), Ceres’ “all-generating womb” conventionally stands for earthly fertility, so his role in her recovery further explains why Pan is the “all-god.” He epitomizes “every natural action, every motion and process of nature, [which] is nothing else than a hunt. For the sciences and arts hunt after their works, human counsels hunt after their ends, and all things in nature hunt either after their food . . . or after their pleasures” (Works 6: 711). In Milton’s Eden, this hunt may be as playful as the lion’s innocent pursuit of the kid (PL 4.343–344), as abstract as Adam’s inquiry into astronomy, or

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as practical as his postlapsarian “invention” of fire to repair the defects of Earth’s altered climate (PL 10.1065–1080). Like Bacon, Milton links the need for this repair to the “rape” of Prosperina or Eve by “Dis” or Satan (PL 4.269–270), a mythical allusion pointedly placed next to his reference to the “Universal Pan” who once reigned in Eden. This placement points to both the tragedy of Eden’s loss and its potential for recovery, for Milton’s Adam will also learn that “very true and wise admonition” Bacon derives from Pan’s recovery of Ceres. This is, “namely, that the discovery of things useful to life and the furniture of life, such as corn, is not to be looked for from the abstract philosophies, as it were the greater gods, no not though they devote their whole powers to that special end—but only from Pan; that is from sagacious experience and the universal knowledge of nature, which will often by a kind of accident, as it were while engaged in hunting, stumble upon such discoveries” (Works 6:713). The fruits of this empirical “hunt” far exceed the barrenness of scholastic abstraction, methods far too rigid or “straight” to be fertile. Adam proves this truism by accidentally discovering fire and whatever “else may be remedy or cure/To evils which our own misdeeds have wrought” (PL 10:1078–1080), while his abstract reasoning fails to reveal the “secrets” of planetary motion. Raphael had already prepared the way for his later success by emphasizing the value of pragmatic observation over barren speculation, a lesson Adam eagerly and innocently embraces (PL 8.167–178, 188–197). Thus as Milton’s Of Education claims, we, too, may “repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him . . . by orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature” (CPW 2: 366–367, 369) Other aspects of Bacon’s fable of Pan vary the “recovery” theme by emphasizing its opposite, the ruin of Pan’s promise by false methods or (to use Bacon’s metaphor) barren “marriages.” Here he focuses on Pan’s sterile marriage to Echo, his apparently “perfect” reflection. Admitting that Echo’s faithful repetition of nature’s sounds (the origin of human words) allowed her “most faithfully [to repeat] the voice of the world itself, . . . being indeed nothing else than the image and reflexion of it,” he adds that unfortunately she “only repeats and echoes [it], but adds nothing” of her own. Such a bride may be a fit partner for Nature from the divine perspective; but, from the lower, creaturely perspective, Echo’s works in the world are too parrotlike and sterile to bear fruit. Bacon draws a similar conclusion from the fact that Echo’s only child with Pan was Iambe, a crooked little woman who delayed

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Ceres’s search for Proserpina by relating “vain babbling doctrines about the nature of things, . . . doctrines barren in fact, counterfeit in breed, but by reason of their garrulity sometimes entertaining; and sometimes again troublesome and annoying” (Works 6:714, 709). Freely inventing this legend out of a quite different story in Apollodorus, Bacon suggests that a better “child” than Iambe would have been born to Pan and Echo if her art and his nature were truly married. He symbolizes this happier union in the “true” marriage of Atalanta or “Art” with her suitor Hippomenes or “Nature.” Yet for this union to bear fruit, the old tale must be rewritten: Atalanta must ignore the vain baubles that Hippomenes casts in her path so she can beat her slower suitor in a new and fairer race. No longer subjugated to her “husband,” Nature, the swiftness of her Art combined with her newly willing and “free” fidelity to Hippomenes will physically and morally restore the human race. Failing to pursue this course will, on the other hand, condemn the human race to the “crookedness” of Iambe-like “babbling” or false knowledge.

t he birt h a nd evolu tion of sin, or fa lse-consciousness Both Bacon’s Advancement of Learning and his Novum Organum additionally embody Iambe’s defects in Scylla, the “idol” of his prototypical false philosophers, the Scholastics. Scylla not only closely resembles Milton’s Sin but also confirms her very real nature and her material effects on human life. Like Scylla, Bacon’s ultimate image of false consciousness, Sin’s deceptively seductive face thinly conceals a corrupt body literally capable of “poisoning” and deforming the minds and works of her admirers. Yet their fate is just because, like the Scholastics, they neither admire nor reflect the true body of nature but merely echo each other. By seeking only a straightened repetition of themselves, not a more ambiguous but also more fertile complement, they destroy their procreative powers along with those of their perverted “bride.” Bacon’s analysis of their self-idolatry is further linked to Milton’s epic through Bacon’s fable of Dionysus, the ultimate “father” of false knowledge and false worship in The Wisdom of the Ancients. An important but overlooked ancestor of Milton’s Satan, Dionysus for Bacon represents the “dark side” of desire who, like the sinner of James 1:13–15, “seizes” an attractive but actually self-destructive good that produces no truly viable

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or useful offspring but Death. In the process, Dionysus predictably destroys his female “Other,” although the victim in this case is his mother Semele, not Satan’s “daughter,” Sin. Yet because Milton’s fallen female is also the mother of Death, the parallel is nearly exact. According to Bacon, the perverse relationship between Dionysus and Semele represents overheated passion’s ability to seduce and be seduced by the “mother” of all desire, “the appetite and aspiration for apparent good,” once “some unlawful wish” is “rashly granted before it has been understood and weighed.” This intemperate heat at first warms but soon destroys its source, “the nature of the good” that “perishes in [its] flame” (Works 6:741). Fallen desire then recoils not just on its “mother” but also on her child or offspring. Although he is initially beautiful, Dionysus suffers such “prickling, pains, and depressions in the mind, that . . . [his] resolutions and actions labour and limp.” He nevertheless disguises this deformity through “indulgence and custom,” which allow him either to “assume . . . the mask of some virtue or [to] set . . . infamy itself at defiance” (Works 6:741). Bacon shows that the mask of Dionysus often confounds his actions with those of Jupiter because he likes to assume a chariot of power “and leads the Muses in his train,” seducing his followers into worshiping him instead of the true God. As in Paradise Lost, this seduction turns his followers into the inventors and founders of all “sacred rites and ceremonies . . . such as were fantastical and full of corruption, and cruel besides.” These sacrifices simultaneously reflect Dionysus’s “original sin” and its consequences, his “infinite insatiable appetite panting after new triumphs” to impress the pompous crew of “ridiculous demons” gleefully dancing about his chariot. In precisely the same way, Satan’s “scoffing” followers dance about his concealed cannon on the penultimate day of Milton’s War in Heaven, which darkly foreshadows their equally destructive “success” on Earth. Yet in neither realm can they conceal the true ugliness of uncontrollable passion, which “ever seeks and aspires after that which experience has rejected,” ever objectifying repellent “others” who reflect their own deformities (Works 6:742). This retelling of the legend of Dionysus treats it primarily as moral or religio-political fable, not as a cautionary tale for empiricists, but Bacon’s allegory of Scylla in The Advancement of Learning and the Novum Organum reveals the close link between the two. Like Semele, Scylla is at once the “toy” and snare of selfish passions masked with the false face of knowledge, power, and beauty. This hollow idol in turn “mothers” all the sterile arts, sciences, customs, and theology

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that Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce embodies in its miniallegory of “Error” and her male counterpart, Custome. A similar allegory appears in Paradise Lost as the daughters of Cain seduce the “sons” of scientific and ethical knowledge into false worship and meretricious crafts (PL 11.576– 591). Like Bacon’s idols of the Cave, Tribe, Marketplace, and Theater, these femmes fatales—”So blithe, so smooth, so gay/Yet empty of all [practical] good” (PL 11.615–616) morally and physically corrupt everything they touch. As in Bacon, however, the root cause is the self-serving “abject and servile principles” of their male “victims,” at once the inciters, accomplices, and casualties of their crimes. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce shows how truly reversible this gender blame-game is by depicting male “Custome” as “a meer face, as Eccho is a meere voice,” an impotent veneer until he finds his other “self” in Error. She “being a blind and Serpentine body without a head, willingly accepts what he wants,” so that this “couple” can conspire to “persecute and chase away all truth and solid wisdome out of humane life” until God calls a halt to their iniquities (CPW 2:223). At first confined to the cavelike mind’s “tribal” fixations on habitual ideas and customs, their “infections” soon spread to the outward habits of language and action represented by Bacon’s idols of the marketplace and theater. Here they subvert natural learning, law (in The Doctrine and Discipline, especially marital law), and finally human nature itself. Turning aside from God and true marriage, their victims seek the superficial physical satisfactions offered by Custome, Error, and the daughters of Cain. At first only a “ruin” in the realm of thought, their insidious effects finally inform every aspect of human endeavor. Because their pollution cannot be “purged” by any ritual means, as in The Advancement of Learning, nothing less than a sweeping cleansing of the inner and outer idols can holistically restore the true marriage of art and nature required by God’s vitalistic continuum. This Baconian model of redemption materially shapes the “free will defense” of Paradise Lost in four fundamental ways: (1) Milton’s matter remains divinely “good” but also fully mutable and capable of being “deprav’d from good”; (2) providential time not only permits but requires change, although God’s universal natural laws and moral dispensations are eternally preserved, not subject to the “fate” of old age; (3) comprehending and applying his laws free postlapsarian life from tyranny and superstition, the twinned idols everywhere condemned by both Bacon and Milton (CPW 4.1:535, PL 12.512); and (4) this understanding at least partially repairs or “cures” physical and human nature itself.18 In this schema all creatures, fallen or

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unfallen, remain free to perfect or pervert themselves and others through idolatry, which makes anti-idolatry into the simultaneous vehicle of virtue, natural redemption, and human liberation. Bacon’s Scylla and Milton’s Sin obviously represent the evil potential of this freedom, the fatal fruit of the ruin created by idol-making or “Dionysian” desire. The false lovers or “philosophers” of these idols deform first their own minds and affections and then the feminine fertility of their “brides,” who, like Echo, produce not unreal but deformed offspring. Bacon gives many names to these male betrayers—Plato, Aristotle, the alchemists and natural magicians—but the most enduring and pernicious remain the Scholastics who “distempered” human learning through their proud self-absorption and “theatrical” unwillingness to actually encounter rather than merely impersonate nature with their pompous, empty words and speeches. Like Dis or Dionysus, they create “female” victims whom they at once “ravish” and imprison in a bleak netherworld, when (as Bacon’s fable of Prosperina reveals) a vital marriage of spirit and matter might have rescued them. Many qualities embodied in Bacon’s Proserpina resurface in Milton’s portrait of the unfallen Eve, whose obvious antithesis is the false Athena erupting full-born from Satan’s head as Sin. This epic event is substantially clarified by Bacon’s nontraditonal retelling of the tale of Athena’s birth, which does not associate it with wisdom but rather with narcissistic and criminal cannibalism. By consuming his pregnant wife Metis (whose name means “counsel”) lest their “son” displace him, in Bacon’s view Zeus deprived himself of the true counsel that Metis would have given him. Similarly sacrificing true negotiation and justice, he then enters the ranks of other selfish male lovers—Dis, Dionysus, Narcissus, and Pygmalion—who embody the intellectual and political tyranny of custom, tradition, and ceremony. By desiring only the apparent—not the real—good, Zeus dooms himself to remain a static and unproductive rather than a progressive or insightful ruler and Athena to become a mere prop or tool for his tyranny. Milton’s Satan initially enters his version of this fallen state by seeking the uncritical counsel of the one angel who, aside from Sin herself, best reflects his “perfect image.” Beelzebub’s soothing echo of exactly what he wants to hear cleverly anticipates the actual birth of Sin by supinely “pleasing” Satan, who once “enamor’d” of Sin’s seductively “attractive graces,” seals their common fate (PL 2:762, 764–765). As when Echo weds Pan or Pygmalion weds Galatea, the result is an abortive repetition of themselves and their works without solid “matter,” the inevitable effect of falling “in love with a

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picture” rather than a reality (Bacon, Works 3.284). Pygmalion particularly resembles both the Scholastics and Satan because he creates a subservient concubine to serve his every pleasure but loses the real “wife” whose fruitful “womb” could have borne him viable heirs or “works.” The material result is male impotence and female perversion, which, in Scylla’s case, is inflicted by her lovers’ repetitiously “barking” and self-serving demands. Although she still has the attractive and “flattering . . . head and face of a virgin,” these demands have “born” terrible “fruit”: Her lower body is covered with “barking monsters, from which she could not be delivered” (Works 4:14). Unlike the Ovidian Scylla, whom she superficially resembles, these canine mouths are not the work of a wicked rival but of male betrayers and “fathers,” whose pompous and “unprofitable subtility or curiosity” (Works 3.286) “sterilizes” her through the poison of false “love,” or methods. Milton’s Sin suffers precisely the same fate: Her still attractive face disguises a body grotesquely deformed by the seductions of the original pseudophilosopher, Satan, and his all-too-deadly son, Death. As Sin’s “inbred enemy,” Death not only repeats but intensifies his father’s crime against his mother by forcibly raping her and “ingend’ring” the “yelling Monsters that with ceaseless cry/Surround” her, hounds “hourly conceiv’d/And hourly born, with sorrow infinite”; for “when they list, into the womb/That bred them they return, and howl and gnaw” her “Bowels, their repast.” Literally a repetition of a repetition, the “hideous Name” Death echoes through all Hell’s “Caves” as his “sons” repeat his crime by viciously “hounding” their mother with “gnawing” terrors and vexations (PL 2.785, 788–789, 794–801. With “wide Cerberean mouths full loud,” the “Hell Hounds” from which she cannot be delivered ring “a hideous Peal” as they “kennel” in Sin’s womb “if ought disturb’d thir noise.” Here they “still bark’d and howl’d/Within unseen,” which explains why “Far less abhorr’d than these/Vex’d Scylla bathing in the Sea that parts/Calabria from the hoarse Trinacrian shore.” No “uglier” creatures “follow the Night-hag” (PL 2: 654–662) who tortures Earth’s natural children. Sin and her offspring thus share a modus vivendi far more lastingly detrimental to natural harmony than Ovid’s literally sterile Scylla or even Spenser’s Errour. With the help of the Redcrosse Knight, the latter simply joins her self-aborting brood and quickly perishes in the light they commonly hate. Yet Errour ironically cherishes her “children” while Sin’s sons are abhorrent to the sense, sight, and ear of their parent.19 They also produce the perpetual dissonance Milton associates with Chaos, although they lack its capacity to “hear” the creative voice of the Son, who

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like Bacon’s Cupid, infuses “vital virtue . . . and vital warmth/Throughout” its “fluid Mass” (PL 7:236–237). Sin’s children will thus predictably petrify and pervert that mass with their fatal bridge to hell, another illicit but real creation. Here, as throughout Milton’s epic, “barbarous dissonance” describes the deformed material sphere that Bacon associates with destructive “perturbations in the heavens,” where art, nature, and “all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds,/Perverse” (PL 2: 624–625). After the human fall, the monstrously material effects of Sin’s “Sign/Portentous” (PL 2:760–761) are repeated on Earth by the “barbarous dissonance” of “that wild Rout that tore the Thracian Bard/ in Rhodope, where Woods and Rocks had Ears/To rapture,” but the worshipers of Dionysus, none. Drowning the divine harmony of Orpheus with their “savage clamor” (PL 7:32–36), they tear the poet limb from limb. Satan comes to embody the same savagery and artistic perversion after preferring his own “perfect image” to a real Other, indulging a desire for the “same” ultimately responsible both for Sin’s deformity and for the repetitive desires and dissonance of their sons. By crafting a Galatea to fulfill his every narcissistic wish, he also breeds an empty Echo who bears only crippled, babbling, and tormenting children. As with Scylla, Bacon’s allegory of false knowledge, and the Error of Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Sin’s vicious side effects begin at the individual level and soon generate more widespread sociopolitical corruption as the “perfect” concubine wins over even the “most averse” to Satan’s program with her “double-formed” charms (PL 2:762–763, 741). With her help, his cohort is seduced into thinking that his sophistic questions about right, precedent, and order are beyond real debate, as Satan’s cynical evasion of Abdiel’s objections shows. This mistake is especially fatal because Satan’s only logical excuse for his rebellion is patently false: He claims that he owes no obedience to God because he and his crew are self-created “partners” of nature spontaneously generated from heaven’s soil. Unlike Bacon’s Lucretian paradigm, this is not a truly evolutionary argument but a baseless “barking” in the dark, a transparently self-contradictory excuse for usurping and hence perverting divine power. For if Satan actually believed that the angels were “born” equally, he could never claim the “natural” priority that he as an Archangel derives from the ancient “Orders and degrees” assigned by God (PL 5.792). In arguing that his customary and, from a Baconian perspective, “idolatrous” rights cannot be properly altered by the Son’s elevation, he thus implicitly admits that a superior power originally did assign the old order.

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As a result, satanic misrule is based upon a classical logical error: His major premise flatly contradicts his minor. Yet like Bacon’s “barking” Scholastics, his crew finds even this Aristotelian error irrelevant because their motive is not philosophical proof but merely self-promotion.

the material experience of evil In a sense, then, Satan and his fallen angels are self-created by their own mental trickery and deceit, but not from nothing. Because even Milton’s God does not create ex nihilo, evil must spring full born from the chaotic “matter” of the satanic mind, where it is first felt in his new sensation, bodily pain (PL 2.752). Like the physical wounds inflicted in Satan’s “Ethereal substance” (PL 6.330) after he and his whole cohort experience pain during the War in Heaven, this laceration can heal but not before further im­pairing Satan’s judgment and management of matter. Just as his body bleeds “a stream of Nectarous humor . . . /Sanguine,” which stains “all his Armor . . . erewhile so bright” (PL 6.332–334), his rebellion “torments” the very air of heaven into a “Conflicting Fire” first of spears and then of cannons (PL 6.244–245, 584–589). The Archangel Michael confirms the fact that the stains suffered by heavenly matter or “Nature” are intolerable precisely because they are not unreal as he lectures Satan: Author of evil, unknown till thy revolt, Unnam’d in Heav’n, now plenteous, as thou seest These acts of hateful strife, hateful to all, Though heaviest by just measure on thyself And thy adherents: how hast thou disturb’d Heav’n’s blessed peace, and into Nature brought Misery, uncreated till the crime Of thy Rebellion? How hast thou instill’d Thy malice into thousands, once upright And faithful, now prov’d false. But think not here To trouble Holy Rest; Heav’n casts thee out From all her Confines. Heav’n the seat of bliss Brooks not the works of violence and War. Hence then, and evil go with thee along, Thy offspring, to the place of evil, Hell,

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Thou and thy wicked crew . . . with augmented pain. (PL 6.262–277, 280, emphasis added)

Despite this dismissal, Michael soon finds (much like Satan after he lands on Earth) that evil is not so easily extinguished. A horrifically portable terror, Satan’s inner wounds plunge him from “the lowest deep” to “a lower deep” still opening wide to “devour” its author, his accomplices, and their victims (PL 4.76–77). Even in heaven, it causes “such commotion, such as, to set forth/Great things by small, if Nature’s concord broke,” and “among the Constellations war were sprung” (PL 6.310–312). This havoc is soon multiplied by Satan’s invention of cannon fire, an unquestionably material (if in heaven, temporary) form of destruction. Literally creating a hell-inheaven, Satan diverts heaven’s unformed rays in their “dark Nativity” from following their natural path into “beauteous, . . . ambient light,” the natural source of every “Plant, Fruit, Flow’r Ambrosial, Gems and Gold” adorning the celestial landscape. Far beneath the “Ethereous mould whereon” they bloom, he finds “Deep under ground, materials dark and crude,/Of spiritous and fiery spume” that he can impregnate “with infernal flame” as powerful as the “Thunderer[’s] dreaded bolt” (PL 6. 473–475, 478–483, 491). These explosive energies prove so effective that only the Chariot of God can quell them, especially because the good angels only worsen heaven’s ruin by heaving its lovely hills on their enemies. Creating a still deeper hell-inheaven, their fight then continues “under ground . . . in dismal shade” and Infernal noise; War seem’d a civil Game To this uproar; horrid confusion heapt Upon confusion rose: and now all Heav’n Had gone to wrack, with ruin overspread, Had not th’ Almighty Father where he sits ... All power on him [the Son] transferr’d. (PL 6.666–671, 678)

It certainly can be no accident that this descent into hell begins at line 6.666 of the poem, the number of the beast who creates such physical havoc at the Last Day when a “new heavens and earth” must be recreated. As in Bacon’s fables and Milton’s divorce tracts, whenever two nearly equal creative forces contend (nearly equal because “sin hath [but] impair’d . . . / Insensibly” the demons), an entirely new phase of nature unfolds. Hell now

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appears on the far side of Chaos while heaven’s “uprooted Hills” are repaired (PL 6.691–692, 781). At that point, the common seductress of the damned is appropriately made hell’s portress, where she symbolically rules over an uprooted, smoky terrain further “tortured” by the demons’ barking questions about fate and free will—questions that the unfree can never answer (PL 2.555–569). Yet they suitably thrive in a corrupted nature which “breeds/ Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things,/Abominable, inutterable, and worse/Than Fables yet have feign’d, or fear conceiv’d” (PL 2: 624–627). Eve later exposes her children to this world of sin and death by allowing Satan to delude her with an “apparent” but insufficiently examined “good.” Accepting the serpent’s specious claim to have ascended the scale of nature by eating the forbidden fruit, she facilely believes that God favors ascent without exception or qualification, and that he will therefore gladly retract his interdiction on the apple. Yet, in an equally important sense, Eve follows the Baconian paradigm of the fall simply by deciding to become a law unto herself. Adam follows suit in claiming that he is literally “bonded” to Eve, idolizing his wife as “Bone of my Bone” and flesh of his flesh, a category error that soon turns her into a tormenting object, a “serpent” with whom he denies any kinship (PL 9.914, 10.867). Their rapid descent into delusion immediately brings bestiality and discord into both their marriage and into physical nature: Mother “Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat/ sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe” (PL 9.782–783). These birth pangs of evil literally “open” their world to the advent of the Infernal Triad: Satan and his offspring, the “Dogs of Hell” (PL 10:616), soon bridge the space between hell and Eden’s “happier Seat,” his gift to “his offspring dear” (PL 10:237–238). Yet Sin and Death’s work is not commanded by their father, but naturally governed by a “secret amity [of ] things of like kind” that spontaneously unites them with Death’s sister, Discord, in establishing Bacon’s third or fallen state of “Pan” on Earth. Discord sets Earth’s creatures against one another while her siblings construct a fit “Monument/Of merit high to all th’ infernal Host,” the hellish bridge or “pontifex” that spreads their cold, dry repetition of deathlike sameness throughout their evil empire. Their vulturelike “amity” or codependence perverts everything in their path, creating a new hell-in-paradise: “carnage, prey innumerable, and . . . /. . . Death from all things . . . that live” (PL 10:258–259, 268–269). This new creation obviously parodies the first, benign birth of nature or Pan from the Divine Word and the “confused seeds” of things, yet it is not simply a false mirror or illusion. Harkening to the voice of “Satan our

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great Author,” his children “Both from out Hell Gates into the waste/Wide Anarchy of Chaos damp and dark/Flew diverse, and with Power (thir Power was great)” hover “upon the Waters” in a malign imitation of God’s brooding holy spirit (PL 10:236, 282–285, 7.234–235). Here they build a pyramid of decay where spontaneous life once reigned. Spurning the confused yet fertile “pregnant causes mixt” of Chaos, they frigidly cement its lowest life forms together with whatever “they met/Solid or slimy” or “petrific” (PL 2. 913, 10:285–286). The great Anarch Chaos protests this perversion, but he is helpless to prevent their conversion of his fluid protoelements into the rigidity of frozen waste. Like “two Polar Winds blowing adverse,” Sin and Death drive nature’s fertile seeds into “Mountains of Ice,” as Death becomes an anti-Neptune. His “Mace petrific, cold and dry, /As with a Trident smote, and fix’t as firm/As Delos floating once; the rest his look/ Bound with Gorgonian rigor not to move,/And with Asphaltic slime” (PL 10:289, 291, 294–298). Their new creation thus embraces every level of life, oceanic, airy, or “animal,” because life begins and remains rooted in the sea (PL 7.387–398). Milton grimly puns on these holistic effects by describing Sin and Death’s path as a “smooth, easy, inoffensive,” an indefensible wound in God’s “now fenceless World” (PL 10:305, 303). Like Xerxes’ attack on the free cities of Greece, Death’s unnatural “yoking” of potentially creative waters with “wondrous art/Pontifical” makes his bridge “all fast, too fast. . . . /And durable” (PL 10:307, 312–313, 319–320). As ideologically “hard” as the false religion and politics they will promote, their misrule will abandon Pan’s benignly “winding and roundabout ways” for the straightness of Dis’s “dismal shades.” Eden of course first feels the “pangs” that will eventually turn her innocently “serpentine” waters into the great Flood and make the garden a sterile “Island salt and bare” (PL 7:302, 11.834). Hence the “grim Feature[s]” of Sin and Death (PL 10:279) now “own” all of “Hell and this World, one Realm, one Continent/Of easy thorough-fare (PL 10:392–393). Yet they no longer govern (as they seem to assume) the true realm of Pan, because their misrule means that their access to heaven’s door is now blocked, a limitation early emphasized as Satan sees Jacob’s ladder descending either “to dare/ The Fiend by easy ascent, or aggravate/His sad exclusion from the doors of Bliss” (PL 3.523–325). This new world’s lack of heavenly harmony is also expressed in the noisy, dissonant vaunts of the Infernal Triad and their cohort. Satan’s all-too-theatrical empire then erupts into contagious babbling and a “universal hiss” from the “innumerable tongues” of serpents, “the

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sound/Of public scorn” that supplants the demons’ “high applause” and mocks the supplanter’s “triumphal” return to hell (PL 10:505, 507–509). In the meantime, Earth’s unfallen connection to heaven is restored by God’s prevenient grace (PL 11.3), although maintaining that connection will now require answering work on humankind’s part (PL 3. 185–197)—but work is the Baconian “cure” for the fall. Hellish hissing is obviously another version of the “barbarous dissonance” that surrounds both Bacon’s Scylla and Milton’s Sin, another reminder of the generative limits of illusion and error, which may be fertile without being benignly constructive or enduring. Lacking any harmonious balance, Satan and his pseudophilosophers exemplify a horrifically real but also limited generativity as they turn into fabulous serpents possessing only dubious scientific reality.20 This liminal status signals their ultimately abortive nature, yet in the short run, their destructive appetites prove as insatiable as Sin and Death, as real as the catalogue of “apostate” demons who will pervert pure worship among the Jews (PL 1. 376–521) and as truly detrimental to human productivity as Bacon’s Idols of the Cave, Tribe, Marketplace, and Theater. As they are forced to chew delusive fruit resembling the apples of Sodom, Satan and his serpentine crew also predict Sodom’s fateful perversions and foreshadow the all-too-enduring appeal of false fruit that “not the touch, but taste/Deceiv’d.” Because its empty, ashy substance is fully concealed until it is “tasted,” Satan and his demons persist in their “drugg’d” obsession with an object that, like the desires of Dionysus and Bacon’s false philosophers, continually attracts though experience teaches otherwise. Consuming “fruits” that cannot quench their thirst or otherwise “deliver” them from evil, the demons appropriately feel the parching and freezing side effects associated with Death’s world-bridging “span” and his “dark materials” (PL 10:563–564, 568, 556), the dark aspect of nature as we know it. The epic’s penultimate book more realistically depicts Sin and Death’s bodily effects on humans in its Lazar House episode, which mainly emphasizes the medical consequences of idolatrous physical cravings. God graciously decrees that this “ruin,” too, will be limited by fate, but the final reunion of “Heav’n and Earth renew’d” may be long delayed (PL 10: 638–640). In the interim, the idols of false desire, rhetoric, and philosophy can be repaired only as the marriage of Adam and Eve is restored, by regaining the once natural cooperation between “nature” and “art,” or male and female. As respective symbols of these aspects of human life, the artful Eve

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and the naturally observant Adam must cooperatively preside over all God’s “works, with good/Still overcoming evil, and by small/Accomplishing great things, by things deem’d weak/Subverting worldly strong, and worldly wise/By simply meek” (PL 12:565–569). This ethic demands a strenuously self-denying discourse utterly unlike the noisy barking of Scylla’s boastful lovers, the clamorous self-adulation of a Dionysus or Pygmalion, or the babbling of the Babel-ish Iambe. In resisting these discourses, Adam and Eve will continue to discover God’s providential “track Divine” in nature, the sure sign of his continuing “goodness and paternal Love” (PL 11:353–554). While they cannot escape the sorrows inflicted by murderous sons like Cain or the “wounds” that his idolatrous daughters inflict on Milton’s true philosophers, the sons of God (PL 11.556–627), they remain free to raise or lower themselves and their environment on Pan’s biform scale by producing either useful “fruit” or “furniture” for life, or nothing but crooked, corrupt, and crippled offspring. In every way, then, Milton abandons the Christian tradition of Augustinian and Pauline dualism and adopts Bacon’s monistic explanation of the fall. Although his allegoreisis may (like Bacon’s) be somewhat backward looking, it also looks forward to an “enlightened” modernity that will typically identify false knowledge and idolatrous “priestcraft” as the chief culprits in humanity’s destructive alienation from God and nature. In this he was joined by his fellow republican James Harrington, who compared false religion to an empty boast not only capable of “scratching and defacing human nature” but also of injuring “the image of God” himself. Harrington described this double offense as a “kind of murder” of the divine image in both humans and their environment.21 Later in the eighteenth century, commentators as different as Edmund Burke and William Blake would follow Harrington and Milton in simultaneously psychologizing and materializing the effects of sin and death, which they Baconianly imagined as beginning with the rape or seduction of a “mother” and ending with a reign of intellectual and political inequity. In these later versions, a repressed or Dionysian id destroys a stable domestic situation and, by internalizing its master, becomes an “equally repressive version of the same,” as Ronald Paulson has shown. As in Milton, the “essential dynamic . . . of energy, . . . contained in and vitalizing the human form” is depicted as fundamentally bipolar. It may give birth to a hell in the shape of “contorted, agonized creatures” Miltonically “associated with flames, flight, vortices, and serpents, . . . awesome and threatening, wonderful and sinister in potential”; yet, once

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these destructive impulses are mastered, this dynamic may give birth to a renewed Eden. Long after Milton and Bacon, the Idols who distort and thwart human and natural creativity thus continue to be allegorically conceived in physical terms; they are not empty abstractions but realities that threaten to pervert both the redeemed imagination and reformed science in a semi-Manichean contest of equal wills.22 Ambiguously plastic, these forces also continue to spring from a Chaos ultimately descended either from Bacon’s mutable Coelum, the “night” of the universe, or from Milton’s “pregnant causes mixt” in Chaos. Ironically anticipating the black holes discovered by modern science—which at once support nature and seem to threaten it with a final “big bang”—these fictions possess both a quasi-scientific truth and a real moral force because “antimatter” is still appropriately associated with all the evils besetting human life and “Mother” Earth, evils still as concretely real as emotional pain and environmental destruction. Notes 1.  Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977). On Hamlet and transubstantiation, see Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 136–162. 2.  One might argue that Donne’s First Anniversarie does bridge this divide through the figure of Elizabeth Drury, yet her unattainable perfection actually signifies our far greater distance from Eden. Donne thus belongs to a more fully “ruined” phase of baroque allegory, as I show in “Unmeete Contraryes: The Reformed Subject and the Triangulation of Religious Desire in Donne’s Anniversaries and Holy Sonnets,”in John Donne and the Protestant Reformation, ed Mary A. Papazian (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 193–220. 3.  The Baconian influences on the young Milton were recorded by his first major biographer, David Masson, and more recently supported by Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform 1626–1660 ( New York: Holmes & Meier, 1976), and Christopher Hill’s The Intellectual Origins of the En­ glish (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1965), 85–130. Unfortunately, Hill’s later biography of Milton drops this influence in favor of a much more speculative positioning of the poet among the “radical Puritan underground.” See Milton and the English Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1977). On Milton’s skeptical linguistics and treatment of “slippery signifiers” in Paradise Lost, see Daniel Fried, “Milton and Empiricist Semiotics,” MQ 37.3 (October 2003): 117–138. 4.  John Milton, Complete Prose Works, 8 vols., ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–1982), 2:563. Milton’s complete prose

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works (CPW) will hereafter be cited in the text by volume and page number. On the nonseamless nature of truth, see 2:555. Milton cites Bacon twice in this tract alone. 5.  Victoria Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to Milton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 225. Blair Hoxby firmly anchors Areopagitica in Baconian discourse in Mammon’s Music: Literature and Economic in the Age of Milton (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). 6.  For a more thorough discussion of this mode, see my Ruins of Allegory: “Paradise Lost” and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). 7.  Stephen Fallon ably focuses on seventeenth-century materialism but follows Anne Ferry’s and Maureen Quilligan’s traditional opinion that Milton’s Sin and Death have no “real” existence. He does recognize that Milton follows “Bacon [in] argu[ing] for the seamless continuity of inanimate and animate spirits” in a cosmos where “inert grosser matter is moved by tenuous pneumatic matter.” Yet he primarily associates Milton not with Bacon’s but with Anne Conway’s materialism, although, as he admits, there are no common sources or any real comparison between Conway’s cabbalistic and Milton’s antimystical atomism (112–113, 118). For a summary of Ferry et al., see Stephen Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 183–190. 8.  Milton’s Paradise Lost is cited by abbreviated title (PL), book, and line number in Merritt Y. Hughes, John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose (New York: Odyssey Press, 1957). 9.  Some critics, however, have found this teaching in Paradise Lost; for a refutation and related bibliography, see my article on “Self-Raised Sinners and the Spirit of Capitalism: Paradise Lost and the Critique of Protestant Meliorism.” Milton Studies 30 (1994): 109–133. 10.  Kenneth Gross, Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Magic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 39–41, 37. 11.  Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, in The Works of Francis Bacon, 14 vols., ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath (London: Longman and Co., 1859), 3:296–297. Bacon’s Works will hereafter be cited in the text by volume and page number. 12.  On this aspect of the Baconian and “Miltonic” revolution, see Howard Schultz, Milton and Forbidden Knowledge (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1955). 13.  Gross, Spenserian Poetics, 27; on narcissism, see 35. 14.  On mortalism in Milton’s poetry, see Raymond B. Waddington, “Murder One: The Death of Abdiel: Blood, Soil, and Mortalism in Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 41 (2002): 76–93. 15.  For an analysis of this paradigm in both Milton and Bacon, see my book chapter on “The Feminine Birth of the Mind: Regendering the Empirical Subject in Bacon and His Followers,” in Francis Bacon and the Refiguring of Early ­Modern

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Thought: Essays to Commemorate “The Advancement of Learning” (1605–2005), ed. Julie R. Solomon and Catherine G. Martin (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2005), 69–88. 16.  As I argue in “Fire, Ice, and Epic Entropy: The Physics and Metaphysics of Milton’s Reformed Chaos,” Milton Studies, ed. Albert C. Labriola. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, vol. 35 (1997), 73–113, Milton’s conception of Chaos is also based on original borrowings from Bacon’s sources, Hesiod and other major Presocratic creation philosophers. 17.  This familiar argument was first advanced by Christopher Ricks in Milton’s Grand Style (Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1963). 18.  The term free will defense refers to Dennis Danielson’s useful discussion of Milton’s literary theodicy in Milton’s Good God (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1982). On the political overlap between Bacon and Milton, see Hill, The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution, and Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 202–278. 19.  For a fuller comparison of the contrasts between Spenser’s Errour, Ovid’s Scylla, and Milton’s Sin (as well as her probable source in Bacon’s Scylla), see my essay, “The Sources of Milton’s Sin Reconsidered,” Milton Quarterly 35, 1 (March, 2001): 1–8. 20.  See Karen Edwards, Milton and the Natural World (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 85–98. 21.  James Harrington, The Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 333. 22.  Ronald Paulson, “Burke’s Sublime and the Representation of Revolution,” in Culture and Politics: From Puritanism to the Enlightenment, ed. Perez Zagorin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 248, 254, 256, 258–259.

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On Vitality, Figurality, and Orality in Hannah Arendt karen feldman

In Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt offers an account of how abstract concepts and philosophical thought depend on what she initially refers to as “vitally metaphorical” language.1 In most respects, Arendt follows a conventional explication of literality versus figurality, where figurative formulations pertaining to abstractions and “mental activities” derive from literal formulations pertaining to bodily experience. Nonetheless, a more profound, albeit veiled, role of the literal body—and specifically the mouth— in the activation of thought and the production of figurality emerges in key moments of Arendt’s thought where speech is at issue. I will argue in this essay that the significance of speech for Arendt in effect situates the mouth at the center of philosophical thought and genuine politics. I will also suggest that this odd centrality of the corporeal mouth for her vision of political life bespeaks a dimension of figurality unaccounted for in Arendt. That is, although Arendt highlights the significance of “speech and action” in her definition of worldliness and politics, what precisely she means by “speech” and how speech both relates to and is differentiated from action remain ambiguous.

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This essay therefore offers a double consideration of the significance of allegory in Arendt’s reflections on language, philosophy, and action. On one hand, I will show that Arendt’s account of philosophical metaphor in fact implicitly concerns allegory as it is conventionally understood—i.e., as extended metaphor. For insofar as Arendt declares that “all philosophical terms are metaphors” (LM 104, my emphasis) and extends philosophical metaphor from nouns to verbs and beyond, she implies that philosophical accounts are themselves extended figural representations—i.e., allegories in the textbook sense. My goal, however, is ultimately to examine Arendt’s narrative concerning the origins of philosophical thought as itself an allegory and thus to follow Hayden White, who writes, “A narrative account is always a figurative account, an allegory.”2 That is, I will suggest that Arendt’s accounts of taste and speech allegorize—in the sense of actively demonstrate or enact—a general ungovernability in the relation of the body and language. Hence, Arendt’s attempt to maintain a strict divide between life processes and the spheres of speech and judgment falters. In this respect, I will argue, Arendt’s account of speech and action in The Human Condition evokes the difficulty of distinguishing speech from action and also literality from figurality. In other words, Arendt’s own formulations concerning speech and action unwittingly allegorize, or dramatize, the difficulty of holding apart her central terms. This second, and more complex, consideration of allegory is therefore less an examination of Arendt’s own understanding of metaphor and figurality than an observation of the ungovernable operations of such extended figurality in Arendt’s own arguments. I thus attempt here to demonstrate in Arendt precisely what Angus Fletcher refers to in Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode as “our psychological and linguistic uncertainty as to what is going on when language is used figuratively.”3

1. m e ta phor a n d t h e mou t h In volume one of Life of the Mind: Volume 1, entitled Thinking, Arendt claims that metaphor is the condition for all philosophical inquiry, insofar as abstract philosophical language borrows from concrete language. She offers as examples of such metaphorical borrowing the nouns psyche and idea (LM 104). Arendt goes on, however, to consider how we describe and account for “mental activities” by means of metaphors: “Mental activities,

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driven to language as the only medium for their manifestation, each draw their metaphors from a different bodily sense” (LM 110). Arendt’s reference here to mental activities indicates that philosophical metaphors involve not just nouns but also verbs related to bodily senses; she points to the significance of terms related to the act of seeing in philosophical treatments of cognition, for instance (LM 110–112). Arendt’s investigations in the same section of figural phrases and sentences in Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein (LM 114–118) indicate that figurality is to be found not only in nouns and verbs but in entire formulations. Such “extended” use of metaphorical language would be precisely associated with allegory in its conventional definition, but Arendt prefers the terminology of metaphor, perhaps because of its closer association with what she calls “poetic thinking.” Borrowing a phrase from Percy Shelley, Arendt explains that poetic language is “vitally metaphorical” insofar as it “‘marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehension’” (LM 102). Arendt adds an Aristotelian gloss that a metaphor “discovers an intuitive perception of similarity in dissimilars” (LM 103). Expanding on the significance of these characterizations of metaphor for philosophical thought, Arendt then cites Kant to reiterate her point that it is only thanks to metaphorical language, borrowed from the realm of the body, that we are able to engage in “‘abstract,’ imageless thought” (LM 103) and to talk or write about “invisible mental activities” (LM 105). Arendt ultimately describes the act of thinking itself as one “whose language is entirely metaphorical and whose conceptual framework depends entirely on the gift of metaphor” (LM 123). Thus, in Arendt’s explanation, “vitally metaphorical” language turns out to be a condition of thinking abstractly and hence of philosophizing, insofar as these depend on the vocabulary of bodily processes. Given the importance of metaphor to philosophical inquiry, it is clear that for Arendt “vitally metaphorical” language is epistemologically productive, on one hand, because it discovers conceptual relations or even forms the condition of abstract thought. But on the other hand, “vitally metaphorical” thinking is, according to Arendt, also politically productive; for “[a]nalogies, metaphors and emblems are the threads by which the mind holds onto the world even when, absent-mindedly, it has lost direct contact with it, and they guarantee the unity of human experience” (LM 109). Metaphors do not just enable us to voluntarily transcend the enclosure of our private minds; rather, they connect us to the world without an act of will on our part. Thus for Arendt metaphorical thinking is a transcendental

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c­ ondition of the persistence of worldly life beyond our voluntaristic participation in it. In this vein Arendt writes, “The metaphor, bridging the abyss between inward and invisible mental activities and the world of appearances, was certainly the greatest gift language could bestow on thinking and hence on philosophy” (LM 105). Arendt’s references to “the gift of metaphor” highlight how metaphorical (and, we might add, allegorical) language serves as a reserve or resource used for thought and philosophy. But Arendt also characterizes metaphor as a process or activity, one of borrowing, which produces the figurative resources for “imageless thought”. She writes, Language, by lending itself to metaphorical usage, enables us to think, that is, to have traffic with non-sensory matters, because it permits a carrying-over, metapherein, of our sensory experiences. There are not two worlds because metaphor unites them. (LM 102)

Here figurality is conceived as an agency or process that unites the nonsensory world with the world of the senses. In this regard, figurality would be not only the stock of borrowed vocabulary, but also that which performs the “bridging of the abyss” between bodily and mental activities. We see, then, that for Arendt metaphor encompasses both the process of bridging nonsensory and sensory worlds and it is also the result of this process, namely the reserve of useful figurative vocabulary for abstractions and mental activities. Arendt’s double portrayal of figurality, namely as both vehicle for and result of transfer from sensory to nonsensory realms, portrays the body as connected to abstract thought only allegorically (i.e., by metaphor). But Arendt tacitly ascribes to the literal body more radical functions; for she also yokes speech to thought in such a way as to suggest that thinking itself does not exist without the literal, speaking mouth. She writes, “Thinking . . . needs speech not only to sound out and become manifest; it needs it to be activated at all” (LM 121, emphasis added). Here the literal body is not merely metaphorically connected or transferred to a realm of thought. Instead, actual speech, which of course occurs with the use of the literal, corporeal mouth, is deemed necessary for thought to take place “at all.” Arendt’s vocabulary of “activation” indicates that actual speech here is temporally and even causally prior to thought. Arendt thus obliquely implicates the mouth and the literal body in the production of thought. This represents a stronger implicit claim for the role of the body in thinking than does her account of

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metaphor, which suggests that the body merely provides a resource for the figurative representation of thought and that the connections between the body and thought are metaphorical connections. Instead, the literal, bodily mouth is here characterized as the literal source of thought. What is more, if speech, and hence the mouth, are at the origin of thought, then the literal body is directly responsible for the production not only of thought but of figurality in general. For if the mouth is the locus of thought’s origination in speech, then the mouth is also where “vitally metaphorical” language and thought get formed. In this regard, the literal mouth would constitute the literal locus of passage from literality to figurality— for, according to Arendt, oral speech activates the thought that moves metaphorically from the literal body to abstractions. A more profound and complicated relationship between the body and “mental activities” emerges in this model: The literal, bodily mouth appears as the origin of thought, and thought makes use of the literal body as a resource for figuring mental activities (of which thinking is one) and abstractions (of which figurality is one). In this regard, the mouth is not only a resource for figurative language with which to describe mental activities (as we will see in the next section on “taste”). It is also where thought is catalyzed and where, therefore, figurality is engendered, including the figurality that is both vehicle for and result of transfer from sensory to nonsensory realms. In sum, in Life of the Mind Arendt first asserts in her analysis of metaphor a trajectory away from the literal body toward figurative representations of mental activities and, second, describes metaphor as that which connects the sensory and nonsensory realms. Nonetheless, her claims for the dependence of thinking on speech allegorize, or enact, a relationship between the body and thought that differs from the one she describes in her account of metaphor. Arendt appears to reinstate the body, or at least the speaking mouth, as the mainspring of that figurality and thus of philosophical thought. The mouth is for this reason also a point of literal and figurative passage from literality to figurality. Hence if Arendt’s claims for the importance of speech to thought are taken seriously, the literal body is not nearly as separable from the production and figuration of mental activities as Arendt claims in her characterization of “vitally metaphorical” language. Or, alternatively, it is conceivable that the vitality of “vitally metaphorical” language requires that the body must be preliminarily or provisionally presumed to be separate from the production and figuration of mental activities to produce formulations that indeed evoke the apprehension of relations. In

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other words, to bring figurality to life, perhaps its aboriginal links to the actual body must be first forgotten.

2. politics and taste In the Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Arendt’s discussion of taste appears to allegorically enact the trajectory she describes in Life of the Mind, where vocabulary is borrowed from the realm of bodily processes to explain abstract mental processes. Because Kant’s Critique of Judgment and specifically Kant’s judgment of taste are the focus of Arendt’s lectures, “taste” is here the central metaphor. Arendt reminds us that for Kant the judgment of taste—the disinterested judgment that an object is beautiful—presumes the possibility of judging in a nonprivate way, i.e., in a way that we could in principle ascribe to anyone and everyone. For Kant, the pleasure we take in observing a beautiful object derives from its effect of quickening our imagination and understanding; and because every creature with these capacities of imagination and understanding is able to have such a feeling of quickening, the judgment of the beautiful in principle presumes the potential agreement of all such creatures as ourselves, although any particular object that provokes such a judgment at any one time is subjectively or privately determined.4 For Arendt, the judgment that something is beautiful—the judgment of taste—constitutes the political element of Kant’s philosophy. Such a presumption of possible agreement with others is evidence for the possibility of what Arendt, borrowing from Kant, calls an “enlarged mentality,” namely the capacity to think outside one’s own private point of view. Arendt quotes a letter from Kant to Marcus Herz: “The ‘enlargement of the mind’ . . . is accomplished by ‘comparing our judgment with the possible rather than the actual judgments of others, and by putting ourselves in the place of any other man.’”5 The judgment of taste, in other words, signals the possibility of thinking beyond the sphere of mere opinion and inclination, beyond the sphere of utter subjectivity. For Arendt, if there is a genuine politics to be lived, it depends on the possibility of such a judgment beyond one’s own private sphere. The possibility of such a politics is evidenced by the judgment of taste, which embodies precisely the comparison of our own judgment with the possible judgments of others. For Kant this ability to compare our judgments with “the collective reason of humanity” exemplifies the sensus communis or common sense (LKPP 71).

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Arendt thus finds evidence for a common sense and a genuine politics in the judgment of taste. But taste–is this not precisely “vitally metaphorical” language in the Arendtian sense? Taste in Kant’s Critique of Judgment refers to an abstract process of judgment, and yet its name is borrowed from the realm of the body and specifically from the sense associated with the literal mouth. It is remarkable that taste, based on the literal and individual mouth, comes to refer both to thoroughly private sensation and the “enlarged mentality” that makes us fit for politics. Arendt herself is startled at this association: “The most surprising aspect of this business is that common sense, the faculty of judgment and of discriminating between right and wrong, should be based on the sense of taste” (LKPP 64). How can private, bodily taste form the basis for nonprivate judgments and hence politics? As we have already seen, Arendt writes in Life of the Mind of the connection between bodily processes and mental activities. She declares, “No language has a ready-made vocabulary for the needs of mental activity; they all borrow their vocabulary from words originally meant to correspond either to sense experience or to other experiences of ordinary life” (LM 102). The figuration of the judgment of the beautiful as a judgment of “taste” would seem to be precisely such an instance in which an abstract mental activity is allegorically represented by means of a particular bodily sense. Thus Arendt writes, “Judgment draws . . . , as Kant knew so well, its metaphorical language from the sense of taste,” and she adds in parentheses, “The Critique of Judgment was originally conceived as a ‘Critique of Taste’. . . the most intimate, private and idiosyncratic of the senses” (LM 111). With regard to the connection between bodily taste and the judgment of taste, vital metaphor explains how this most private sense can come to stand for the basis of politics.

3. t h e spe a k i ng mou t h i n pol i t ic s In explaining how metaphor permits a transition from the literal sense of taste in the mouth to the figurative sense of taste in aesthetic judgment, Arendt seems quite easily to leave the physical body behind in referring unproblematically to a “mental activity” of judgment. Her account of the judgment of taste conforms to her claims in Life of the Mind for the metaphorical transfer from sense experience to mental activities. But is the body categorically excluded from mental activities and from the political? Can

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it be left behind so easily with regard to sensus communis and political life? The apparent absence of the body in Arendt’s understanding of politics is something that feminist and other readers of Arendt have pondered. For instance, Julia Kristeva suggests that Arendt’s lack of philosophical interest in the body derives from her conviction that our bodies are what render us the same, whereas it is our actions that make us different, that make us each a “who” instead of a “what.”6 Why for Arendt are nature, the body, and the realm of need apparently opposed to the sphere of action and freedom? I suggest that there is a way in which the literal, bodily mouth not only belongs to but defines the sphere of politics—that the mouth is, in fact, the center of politics according to Arendt’s own conception of genuine political life. Let us consider for a moment the literal mouth with regard to Arendt’s own definitions of privacy and publicity. On one hand, the mouth is part of the body, and in Arendt’s analyses the body as a whole is private insofar as it is involved with metabolism and with life processes—with what she deems the sphere of labor in The Human Condition.7 In this regard Arendt would seem to confine orality to the prepolitical and idiosyncratic sphere of privacy, such that “taste” could come to refer to judgment only by way of “vitally metaphorical” language. On the other hand, if any single part of our body is important to Arendt’s philosophy of the human condition, insofar as it defines our human and political potentials, would it not have to be the mouth? For Arendt writes, “Speech is what makes man a political being” (HC 3), and she suggests that human beings can experience meaningfulness “only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and to themselves” (HC 4). With regard to public speech, then, the mouth is not primarily a bodily passage. Rather it is the site where a body is transformed by the act of speech into what she calls a “who” (HC 178–180). The mouth is the literal place where speech takes shape, where the bare breath and intonation are shaped into speech that lets us be in a world with other human beings. The mouth is where bodily breath becomes words; it is thus a strange passage both from body to speech and, therefore, from privacy to politics. Insofar as the literal mouth is the place of speaking, and hence of speaking together with others, it belongs to the quintessence of political life and is not merely a resource for the allegorical representations of abstractions. Thus far we have seen that speech is in Arendt’s work a passage from imagination to communication, from private to public, from solitude to

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Mitsein. We have also seen that, with regard to speech, the literal, corporeal mouth turns out to exceed the trajectory of figuration that Arendt describes in Life of the Mind. Not merely a resource for Kant’s figurative formulations concerning taste, the mouth as the locus of speech is instead for Arendt the catalyst of thought, the origin of figurality, and the literal passage from privacy to politics, a passage that Arendt’s appropriation of Kant offers as the source of hope for a genuine politics and thus a truly human life. These direct connections between the bodily mouth and the quintessence of politics depend, once again, on speech. But is something strange going on here? By way of this itinerary through “vitally metaphorical” language, judgment, enlarged mentality, taste, and above all speech we arrive at the literal mouth as the source of thought, figurality, and politics. Indeed I would suggest that something about the repeated appearance of the literal mouth here is strange, first of all because thinking is not activated only in oral speech. A book, such as Life of the Mind or The Human Condition, also accomplishes the disclosure of thinking in a public realm. It connects ourselves to the world, and to each other, in the ways that Arendt describes “vitally metaphorical” language as doing. A book is able to perform this quasi-messianic function of opening new ways of thinking because it is something in the world. The very worldliness of the book in which we read about the thinking as one-way figurality, as leading from body to the supersensory, puts the presumed primacy and literality of the body into question. Perhaps the vitality that Arendt ascribes to metaphorical language too hastily presumes that the literal body is indeed the origin of figurality—i.e., presumes that the activity of figuration both is secondary to a securely literal body and also issues from it. But figuration is not at all secondary to even the literal body and the functions that are ascribed to it. For here we might ask, What is speech? Could Arendt mean the act of speaking with the mouth; or, instead, the less directly corporeal product of this act; or is she using speech in an extended fashion, for instance to refer to language? And moreover, on what basis could we be certain, and anyway how could we ever define these differences with precision and certainty? How do we know where Arendt is writing literally, metaphorically, or allegorically? Here the uncertainty mentioned in Angus Fletcher’s characterization of the “psychological and linguistic uncertainty as to what is going on when language is used figuratively” (ATSM 11) is extended to an irresolvable uncertainty as to whether language is used figuratively or not in the first place.

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4. speech, action, a nd t he v ita lit y of uncertain figur alit y I would suggest that Arendt’s conjunction in The Human Condition of speech and action allegorize—i.e., demonstrate by way of enactment—the difficulty of locating the literality of the body, and specifically the mouth, in Arendt’s references to speech and thus to orality. For the definition of speech with regard to action is no easy matter in The Human Condition. Becoming a “who,” according to Arendt, is a matter of speech and action. She writes, “In acting and speaking men show who they are. . . . this disclosure of ‘who’ in contradistinction to ‘what’ somebody is . . . is implicit in everything somebody says and does” (HC 179). But the precise relationship between speech and action is not clear, and in this regard the role of the literal mouth might be questioned. Arendt attempts to explain: “Action and speech are so closely related because the primordially and specifically human act must at the same time contain the answer to the question asked of every newcomer: ‘Who are you?’” (HC 178). Arendt even writes, “[M]any, and even most acts, are performed in the manner of speech” (HC 178), and “Speechless action would no longer be action” (HC 178). Despite the many and complicated references Arendt makes to speech and action, it remains unclear what the relationship is between them and even what the distinction between them might be. Critics have gone in different directions in surmising whether for Arendt speech is itself action (emphasizing the performative component); whether action requires speech as a supplement (emphasizing Arendt’s references to storytelling); or whether there is action at all apart from speech. The text is not at all univocal in this regard, however, and thus enables such divergent interpretations of what precisely “speech and action” means. Speech and action: Are these two separate terms, or could this phrase be a hendiadys, making two of what is really just one? Hendiadys is a figure of elocution, a figure of speech, of division—of one into two, hen dia duoin. The classic examples of hendiadys transform a phrase composed of adjective and noun into a pair of nouns—e.g., “We’ll come despite the rain and weather” instead of “We’ll come despite the rainy weather.” An example from the film The Blues Brothers depicts the perplexity that hendiadys can engender, namely when the brothers find themselves in a bar proud of its own pluralism in featuring music both country and western. Is the phrase “speech and action” a hendiadic reference to something else, for something

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like speechly action, actionlike speech? And if so, can we know for sure where the literal mouth fits into this conjunction? The recurring combination of the words speech and action suggests the hendiadys, raises the question as to whether speech and action are one and the same. But the formulation “speech and action” can also be read as differentiating them, as distancing the speech of the mouth from action in the world. It can, for that matter, also be read as a statement of transition from speech to action, e.g., as speech becoming action. Likewise, in different moments Arendt seems to imply different possibilities: speech as distinct from action, speech as a form of action, action as requiring speech, speech that becomes action. How do we know whether this “and” signifies a sameness, a differentiation, or a becoming? Not any help is Arendt’s ambiguous statement that “[m]any, and even most acts, are in the form of words” (HC 178). What form of words makes a deed? What is a deed without words? How are deeds figured or rendered deeds at all by words? When Arendt cites Shelley’s reference to “vitally metaphorical” language, she defines that figurative vitality as evoking apprehension of relations. But the vitality of figurality, including that of allegory, is not nearly exhausted by its capacity to evoke such apprehension. For the “vitality” of the phrase “speech and action” would be too restricted by Arendt’s association of “vital” figurality with “the apprehension of relations.” Indeed the phrase speech and action is central—even vital—to Arendt’s text and to many of her readers not because we apprehend the relations between speech and action. Rather the phrase raises the question, What precisely are the relations being marked? Is it even a matter of relation at all, which would mean that speech and action are separable, or are speech and action one and the same? If they are one and the same, we are back with the mouth—the literal mouth would be the location of action. But are they one and the same, and how would we ever know, based on their proximity in Arendt’s text? Perhaps the “vitality” of the phrase speech and action consists precisely in the fact that we cannot be sure whether speech and action means “speech is action” or means “speech is not action”; and thus Arendt unwittingly produces an allegory of uncertainty as to whether hendiadys is here in play at all. Figurality is in such an instance vital, but this “vitality” derives at least as much from such uncertainty with regard to the relations it marks as from the relations it discloses. That is, vital figures mark relations, but just what relations are being marked cannot be decided on the basis of the figurative formulation alone. Indeed I would suggest that in this regard Arendt ­underestimates

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the vitality that she associates with the metaphorical language on which she claims philosophy is based. Even the “vitality” of “vitally metaphorical” language would, according to Arendt’s conventional description of figuration, refer in the first instance to the vitality of the body and only metaphorically to the vitality of language. But does vitality begin with the body or with the figures that ascribe vitality to the body? Where the vitality of vital figures comes from, or whether it comes from the body or conversely moves in the direction of the body, cannot be known for certain from the figure itself; Arendt’s eclipse of the bodily mouth in her accounts of speech and taste allegorize precisely this uncertainty. Figures do not testify to their own sources or directionalities; and, if they did, how could we be certain that they would be speaking literally? Open-ended thinking, including Arendt’s, depends on the vitality of “vitally metaphorical” language. It lives precisely in an epistemological lacuna, amid uncertainty with regard to the source and direction of figuration and likewise with regard to whether it is ever entirely completed and closed off from the concepts it produces. Notes 1.  Hannah Arendt, Life of the Mind, Volume 1: Thinking (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 102. Hereafter referred to as LM. 2.  Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 48. 3.  Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964), 11. Hereafter referred to as ATSM. 4.  See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987); “quickening [Belebung]” is introduced on 88 and the presumption of the assent of others on 89. 5.  Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 43. Hereafter abbreviated in text as LKPP. 6.  Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 171–184. 7.  See especially Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 79-93. Hereafter referred to as HC. Linda Zerilli notes in her essay on Arendt and the body that the body itself is figured as oral and as ravenous; human Mitsein in Arendt is hungry, and of course the mouth is the place of literal ingestion (Linda M. G. Zerilli, “The Arendtian Body,” in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995, 171).

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Allegory and Science From Euclid to the Search for Fundamental Structures in Modern Physics ja mes j. pa x son

Even postmodern philosophy of science often tries to exclude figurality from science and mathematics, in spite of what might now be commonly thought about postmodern thought in the wake of deconstruction and its related disruptive theories and practices. In his 1993 study of Leibniz’s monadology and baroque esthetics entitled The Fold, philosopher Gilles Deleuze begins with an olympian emphasis: that mathematics is the inscription of the literal, indeed, that mathematics—and science—are the literal.1 It would therefore be counterintuitive at best and erroneous at worst to take science as a discourse or system of semiosis in which the relationships of representation could be corrupted and threatened by figurality—the sort of figurality that constitutes most flamboyantly (and historically) that mode or genre or discourse that we label “allegory.” This is the mode that proceeds by “saying other” (as the old Greek expression from classical rhetoric, allos agoreuein— “to say other”—means).2 Allegory, both intuitively and historically, seems to be that discourse that would be most threatening to science. In this short essay, I shall put forward the radical idea that some of the most important advances in modern science, namely in physics, rely on

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tacitly allegorical structures. More precisely, the grand narrative containing the succession of scientific models that seek to describe the fundamental structures of matter and energy, of space and time, might just involve an allegory of some prior, even archaic, though holistic form. In the experimental picture of this paper, I will consider the geometry of Euclid. Does the succession or progression of modern physics’s search for fundamental structures stand as an “allegory of Euclid”? This elementary Gedankenexperiment can begin by acknowledging not the separation of science from figurality but its dependence on figure—simile, metaphor, hyperbole, prosopopeia or personification, paradox, irony, and so on. Just over a half-century ago (and prior to the more celebrated impact of C. P. Snow), Jacob Bronowski declared that a scientific picture was in fact no more or no better than a metaphorical or analogical system, a marshalling of “likenesses” creatively perceived and manipulated by the scientist.3 Thomas Kuhn’s groundbreaking study of the early 1960s about competing and superseding scientific “paradigms”;4 Gerald Holton’s career-long project of charting so-called scientific themata of literary and mythographic quality;5 or the identifying of programmatic rhetorical figures and tropes used in the initial phases of scientific discovery6 —all extend Bronowski’s persistent and on-target formulation. If Quintilian once declared that the mode we call allegory was a kind of extension of the handy figure known as metaphor, then one might intuit further a link between the constitutive or initiating metaphors or figures of scientific discovery (as per Bronowski’s declaration) and the grander mode called allegory.7 A more fully fledged literary theory of modern science’s inhabitation by allegory, however, has already produced fascinating results. To name the work of one of the most salient of researchers, Bruce Clarke’s study of the allegorical discourses inhering in nineteenth-century scientific commonplaces such as entropy, the luminiferous ether and the energy flows in Kelvinian thermodynamic theory, shows an enduring dependence on the mode by both popular and mainstream science writers.8 I have previously demonstrated allegorical properties of thinking and writing in the mathematical productions of Newton, earlier in the seventeenth century.9 The very idea of a bilevel reality that inhabits how we think about allegory may hold promise for better understanding the advancements of modern science. Allegory proceeds by showing how one thing—a sensuous object, a person, a locality—can signify an other—an idea, a complex philosophical or theological or historical concept. That is to say, an allegory

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might present one narrative while that narrative “points” to another. In the history of science we often go forward by showing how new scientific pictures simply abandon or obviate or at best vitiate prior models and pictures, prior narratives. In the sort of conceptual scheme propounded by an older and more traditional historian of science such as E. A. Burtt, a new scientific narrative or model competes with or succeeds a prior one.10 Such is, of course, even the upshot of Kuhn’s own “competitor” or rhetorical persuasion theory of scientific success. Aristotle’s theory of gravity (described in the De Physica),11 understood as a natural motion or inclination toward the center of the universe, must expire and give way to Newton’s theory of gravitation (in the Principia), which must itself finally give way to Einstein’s more exotic theory of gravitation as a “curvature” in space-time.12 I wish to show how one narrative arc in the fundamental structures of physics seems to proceed by producing ever-newer images, metaphors, and models of geometrical reality at the nano-scale level. The successionist narrative of better models or pictures obviating and replacing prior ones instead might itself be obviated by an “allegorical” system in which the newer model or picture faithfully though furtively incorporates or reproduces a far older scheme by actually instantiating an allegory of that older scheme. Allegories often work by presenting a base level of narrative, of reality, that points to a second, or prior, or higher level—an allos, “other.” For the demonstration at the heart of this essay, I choose, as that older or prior scheme, the geometrical system of Euclid in The Elements. I argue that allegorically reincorporating some structure of this Euclidian system is the narrative of how modern physics has manifested its ongoing search for fundamental structures. The explicit and overt claims of modern physics have been that it continues to carry the world boldly to ever-newer ontologies and epistemologies of being and knowing. In the least, this catechism might prove ironic (and ironia has itself been viewed, not accidentally, as a constituent trope in classical allegoria).13 The advances in modern physics, at least since Einstein and the early quantum theorists, have produced models of matter, energy, and space-time that purportedly are characterized by “post-Euclidian” geometries. These are home to some very difficult mathematics that is imply well beyond the apprehensive faculties of the human sensorium and the practical imagination. By first reviewing key features of the term allegory, I will demonstrate the “stratified” hierarchical quality of certain allegorical systems shared by mathematics and literature. I will then resketch the successionist picture of

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modern physics’s search for fundamental structures as a plausible allegory of the succession of geometrical forms constituting Euclid’s Elements. The task is not as counterintuitive as it might at first seem. Everyone knows that the Elements of Euclid are the source and font of all basic geometrical instruction, even today, and that its many pages proceed from simplest, to more complex, to very complex—that is to say, via the logical representation in visualized and rigorous formulation from zero-dimensional geometrical entities, through one-dimensional entities, through two-dimensional or plane-geometry entities, through three-dimensional or solid-geometry entities.14 An allegory is a semiotic system by which one thing can mean or be programmatically structured by something else. Therefore, the most elementary kind of allegory would be bilevel. Allegory involves significational supplementarity: The thing “meant” always exceeds somehow the signifying capacity of the sensuous signs put in its place.15 Allegory, because its signifier always marks a difference, a distance, from its signified, may perforce involve a sense of temporal distantiation.16 Just about all definitions of allegory through the centuries of Western thought take hold of these spare schemae in some form. In the 1960s, the deconstructionist Paul de Man redefined allegory as the inscription of temporality itself, that is, as the coded language of the “anteriority” exhibited by all sign systems: All signs (the conjunction of the signifier and its deictically realized signified) merely point back to other signs; and all we get in “allegory” is this constitutive and phenomenologically reductive effect. De Man’s initial understanding seems to naturally set us up for the all-consuming definition of allegory that marks his later theoretical productions—essays in which all human acts of cognition or at least all acts of reading become “allegories of reading.”17 But the demystifying sense of defining allegory had come earlier, in definitions crafted by the twentieth century’s more authoritative literary historians of premodern literature. A few decades before the archmodernist de Man, C. S. Lewis explained that allegories were workmanlike though nonmystical hierarchical collections of “sacramental” or personificational signs of the sort that made up, say, the poetry of Dante.18 This dual quality thus takes us back to a point I visited above—back two millennia in Western rhetorical and poetic thought to the most prominent of the Roman lawyer-rhetoricians, Quintilian (more prominent even than Cicero himself on these grounds). In his monumental Institutio oratoria, Quintilian defines allegory as an extension,

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a linear seriation, in a narrative, of a key metaphor.19 It is a trenchant metaphor to speak of a king as the “captain” of a ship of state; one might produce such a metaphor once and for all and be done with it in a poem, an oration, or an essay. But when one extends that sole metaphor, when one elaborates on it—saying that the king is the captain of the ship of state; that the senate or parliament is the rudder of the ship; that the army is the prow of the ship; that the priests and philosophers are the mast of the ship—then one no longer has used an isolated metaphor that works as a “local” rhetorical utterance. One now has an “allegory.” A bilevel model such as this Quintilianic procedure, in which one (narrative) layer or level gets adumbrated on a second level, works for literary artifacts and may, I believe, hold promise for the continua of other discourses—namely mathematics and physics. I have elsewhere rethought the sixteenth-century advent of the logarithm, an invention of Scottish mathematician John Napier through the notion of allegory as a bilevel architecture or, more precisely, as a networked grid of different strata, of linked and parallel signifiers and signifieds.20 Napier had worked out a system of the logarithm, or progressive exponent, largely by the 1590s, though he’d gone on to publish his results in the 1614 book, Mirifici logarithmorum canonis descriptio, “A Description of the Wonderful Rule of the Logarithms.” Simply put, Napier’s discovery works this way: At the main inscriptional level or stratum, the relation of numbers or values in an equation might be multiplicative; at a second, higher yet linked level, the logarithms of those numbers to be multiplied correspondentially relate in an additive way. And that’s what we still are taught in a precalculus course (though more so if we were educated back in the days of the slide rule).21 To save time in multiplying, you find the logarithms of two numbers that you want to multiply, then add the logarithms, and then, using an inverse-log table, find the true product of your original two numbers. Napier asserts this correspondentialist logic himself, and its perfection is emphasized by Morris Kline, in his own monumental history of mathematics.22 To be sure, the process smacks of a kind of alchemical or magical air. It certainly calls up the dual-leveling of platonism. But I submit that the correspondentialism that intuitively “guided” Napier, to use Kline’s words, arose as a rhetorical if not literary idée fixe in an intellectual era permeated by literary and artistic allegory—in the intellectual context of Spenser and of Shakespeare, Napier’s contemporaries. The logarithmic system seems “allegorical” because it depends on two systematically layered planes of linked signs, each in a scriptive or graphic continuum.

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Let us compare this to Spenser. We can think of the great allegorical decodings of Spenser’s Faerie Queene by its prominent twentieth-century literary critics—C. S. Lewis again, Edwin Greenlaw, Harry Berger Jr., Rosemond Tuve, John Steadman—who’ve delineated such equational networks and grids for us.23 As a model, we have the poem’s opening scene of Book 1, Canto 1, in which three closely tied characters—the unnamed Red Cross Knight, a woman all in white named Una, and a lazy Dwarf—enter the so-called Wandering Wood to encounter the serpent-monster named Error. Indisputably the literal level points to another level hovering above it, in which the three characters are personifications: Red Cross Knight is Holiness; Una is Platonic Unity; and the Dwarf is Sloth, the medieval sin of acedia. Perhaps at a linked but parallel level beyond that, the three characters respectively become the historical Saint George (patron of the English nation), the historical Anglican or True Church, and the English peasantry. So the lateral relation of embodied historical entities or institutions at one level corresponds to the lateral relation of personified abstractions at the next level. This resembles the logic I propound for Napier’s logarithm, with its dually multiplicative-additive sets of operations. Yet the former is a literary effect, the latter a principally scientific or mathematical code, one emerging out of nature itself as the very language of nature, as Galileo would have held. The apprehending of a master trope on which bi-level allegory gets built bears some more explanation as to how modern philosophy of science has successfully resorted to rhetoric’s reservoir of tropes to articulate the processes of scientific discovery in general. Earlier, I mentioned the work of modern historian of rhetoric Jeanne Fahnestock, who has identified some of the master tropes on which the world’s greatest scientific discoveries have depended. In her 1999 book, Rhetorical Figures in Science, she shows how Newton tacitly prioritized chiasmus or antimetabole, the trope of syntactic reversal. Fahnestock argues that the Third Law of Motion as expressed in the Principia—the Law blandly couched in high school physics textbooks as the Law of Equal and Opposite Reactions (“for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”)—really rests on an exciting chiasmus. Few may recall the sage’s famous analogy, “If you press a stone with your finger, the finger can be said to be pressed back by the stone.” The simple inversion of grammatical cola in the complete sentence, in which subject and object get transposed to produce a clever new result, leads perhaps to the concept of mutual action and perhaps even mutual attraction as well.24 For the mo-

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ment, we need only agree with Fahnestock that a localized rhetorical trope can be built up into a complex idea system—one at the heart of a strong and new scientific hypothesis or theory. But we would do well to recall that, in this special instance—the chiasmus of the Third Law of Motion—the inversional logic of chiasmus or antimetabole might just bear a connection to the fact that Quintilian at times named allegoria using a Latin expression, inversio, and that Newton’s economical utterance actually engages the rhetorical figure prosopopoeia or personification, allegory’s most enduring master trope. (How often do stones press back at my finger—unless motivated in a prosopopoetic or anthropomorphic narrative?)25 More to Fahnestock’s point, that utterance is a chiasmus or antimeta­ bole, the trope whereby one syntactically inverts a first “colon” (a complete grammatical clause) to produce a second and following colon. The composite effect produces, in an inversely symmetrical, semicolon-spliced new sentence, something that did not exist before. “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” This is John F. Kennedy, we all know, an orator who loved the trope chiasmus, as witness his other utterance, “We must put an end to war or war will put an end to us.” Fahne­stock goes on to show how this simple syntactical trope worked for other great scientists—not in the least being Michael Faraday, who had conceptually inverted the position and the circular motion of his famous ­electrified-wire-and-magnet experiment of the year 1830 to go on to produce the theory of reciprocal electric-magnetic induction.26 Without Faraday and his transposed wires and magnets, we would be absent of electric motors and Westinghouse Corporation; nor would we have had a Clerk Maxwell some decades later with his unificational electromagnetic theory—and, in turn, Albert Einstein’s Earth-stopping 1905 paper, “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper” (“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”).27 The inverted and newly complete sentence comprised of its two symmetrical cola works like a “simple machine” to get more work out of a modicum of words. The device moves the reader’s or hearer’s mind using a simple lever. It’s interesting that the logarithm is a force multiplier—that is, it allows you to do more mathematical work faster, just like Newton’s or Leibniz’s integrative infinitesimal in the calculus—and that tropes or figures are force multipliers. They are—if I might continue to invoke Archimedes for a moment—like levers or wedges or pulleys. They are simple machines that enable the completion of more work using minimal effort. That’s what the chiasmus did conceptually for Newton and for Faraday (and for the

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i­ndustrialist Henry Ford through his ultimate elaboration of that tool called the assembly line in which, to apocryphally quote Ford himself, “You bring the work piece to the man, not the man to the work piece”). The multiplication of energy in work for the classical or medieval or Renaissance rhetorician involves just that—the linguistic freeing and enlivening via another tropological effect, energia. Allegory, as theorists such as Bruce Clarke or Angus Fletcher have well noted, is the mode par excellence of the freed or multiplied presence of linguistic and cognitive energia, its connection to allegory long essential in rhetorical thought.28 Energia so understood takes us to modern physics’s allegorical narrative of the successionist model. But let it be said in getting there that, just as Fahnestock discerned rhetorical antimetabole or chiasmus to be at the heart of Newton’s or Faraday’s discoveries, so she discerns the figure ploche—the lateral and multiplied repetition of a word or element in a discourse, even to the extent that the effect creates a kind of “plaiting”29 —in all sorts of analogically dependent scientific discoveries but especially in biological taxon­omy or cladistics. Perhaps we might think of the bilevel or dualistic quality of narrative and logarithmic allegory as hinging on the figure ploche—­another lever, so to speak, enabling a new system of figural discovery making. The Archimedean notion holds too; allegory works as a massive machine built up out of simple machines, out of levers and their fulcrums, that seek to harness and dispense what Bruce Clarke calls “energy forms.” Allegory is the discursive form of energy par excellence; or, as Fletcher well demonstrated, it is the discourse of the daemon, the diminutive but energetic being, the very personification of energy of the sort that Maxwell conjured to fantasize about the sorting, in a bicameral and periodically sealed chamber, of hot or cool gases, in his famous Gedankenexperiment. Ever since the thinking of Democritus or Lucretius, we’ve been attracted to the image of the atom, that which is “indivisible.” Again, it was a longheld supposition in the traditional history of science that the indivisible, and perhaps infinitesimally small, status of the atom paralleled Euclid’s own opening idea in the Elements: The atom must be a punctus, a point. That is the very first definition on the first page of Euclid’s book: “A point is that which has no parts” (Punctus est cuius pars non est, as the medieval Latin had it).30 From this we proceed to the definitions of lines and rays, and then on to planes, then on to circular and rectilinear figures. Some hundreds of pages later we arrive at the requisite definitions and propositions about solid figures. Euclid’s system is ascendatory and hierarchical. Subsequent defini-

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tions and propositions build on and contain prior ones. Such organizational logic is the very grammar, if you will, of a Euclidean concept of space (that is, classical space taken as “the set of all points,” as first-year geometry students are still taught). Such Euclidean geometrical mapping characterizes and controls not only the earlier astrophysical achievements in revolutionary Western scientific thought—Copernicus’ De revolutionibus of 1543 or Galileo’s Nuncius siderius of 1610—but the more revolutionary De principia by Newton, for which he could have used his already developed calculus (which he called “fluxions”) but preferred instead the more comfortable system of Euclidean geometrical proofs.31 When J. J. Thomson theorized the electron in 1897, he was still guided by this ancient understanding of an elementary particle of infinitesimally small size (and puny energy)—perhaps a tiny spheroid, a “corpuscle, though certainly something conforming to a mere geometrical point.”32 The same went for Ernest Rutherford’s larger proton of 1918: These too were points, zero-dimensional, effervescent phantoms recalling Euclid’s own primordial principles. Electrons flew around the central proton or nucleus—an image long used as a visual logo by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission well after the demise of the simplified standard model.33 And the same went for James Chadwick’s mediational particle, the so-called neutron theorized by the early 1930s.34 But metaphorically, the point-concept, the fundamental metaphor in the so-called standard model of particle physics, gave way in succeeding decades to more complex arrangements. The quantum theorists tried thought experiments about elementary particles existing as point-forms and/or wave forms: we should recall the merely “numberable” electron’s status, but not its geometry, in the Bohr atom.35 We might recall, too, Max Born’s image of electrons as analogous to the fixed points on a moving crankshaft, each “stroke” of said shaft enacting a Gaussian curve that signified a wave of probability, to use Bronowski’s elegant summary of the theory; or, Louis de Broglie’s image of an electron orbit as a fluctuating and nonfixed quasigeometry—first a trefoil, then a cinquefoil—surrounding an atomic nucleus of protons and neutrons as a closed wave form.36 As the tide of discovered particles through the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s swelled—producing bosons, tau mesons, pions, and so forth—the general concept of a little infinitisimality, a puny sphericle or mere point, that was evanescent, perhaps coupled with/as a wave form—continued. However, this was a greatly compromised

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“geometry” scarcely available to the practical imagination or to the mathematics that most scientists were capable of doing. And yet the Euclidean analogy—let us call it the Euclidian allegory— takes a more interesting turn with the eventual beginnings of string theory in the 1960s by Yochiro Nambu and Lenny Susskind, and later, in the 1970s and 1980s by Edward Witten.37 In accord with the requirements of the unification of forces, fundamental physics needed to see a more basic structure behind the four basic forces of nature (electromagnetic, strong nuclear, weak nuclear, and gravity). A more mathematically elegant description of putatively existent “quantum gravity” led to subatomic entities that were no longer following Euclidean conceptions, zero-dimensional points but that were one-dimensional line-segments or “strings.” We can say that the analogy of Euclid, traced in the earliest pages of his Elements, has been mapped onto the progressive or successionist history of elementary physics as an “allegory”: The passage from geometrical punctus to linea, a conceptual passage at the headwaters of the most influential scientific text of the Middle Ages, names the metaphorical or allegorical passage from subatomic particle physics to subatomic string (or “superstring”) physics. And yet Witten himself was extending the geometrical metaphoricity of these “stringy” or superstringy models by the 1990s, proffering his socalled M-theory (M whimsically standing for “magic” or “matrix” or “mystery” or some other exotic, and requisitely alliterating, term). This led in turn to the ascent up the (meta) geometrical ladder in an era of conceptual schemes that was abandoning the classical stuff of Euclidean objects (at the nano-scale of being). Brane theory replaced for many fundamental physicists those one-dimensional strings with “membranes” in various complex configurations.38 In sum, and to recapitulate this starkly paraphrased narrative of the history of modern fundamental-structure physics, a 0-brane is a zero-dimensional pointlike particle recalling the entities peopling the standard model; a 1-brane is a string, while a 2-brane is a “membrane.” The two-dimensional membrane is of course a metaphorical recasting, perhaps a biological one, of Euclid’s planar surfaces, the geometrical objects that in fact occupy most of the Elements—the simple planes or polygons (triangles, squares, rectangles, rhomboids, parallelograms, and so forth) comprising simple or two-dimensional Euclidean geometry and trigonometry. To sum up: We have, in physics’s (post)modern, post-Euclidean world of fundamental structural thought, traced an allegory of the progressive levels of Euclid’s hierarchy in the Elements. The move from particles to strings to membranes

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parallels the move from points to lines to planes in Euclid’s great ur-text or, to use another term expressly from the literary history of allegory, his “pretext,” as allegory theorist Maureen Quilligan would define it.39 This allegorical logic would dictate that we now move to fundamental structures that are three-dimensional—or beyond. But where could scientists go in contemporary, twenty-first-century fundamental physics from the two-dimensional membrane, modified descendant of the one­dimensional string, modified descendant of the zero-dimensional pointparticle, as they craft allegories that are ever stranger and more complex? A lively capsulization in a 2007 issue of Scientific American foretells where modern fundamental physics’s allegory of ascending Euclidian forms seems to be going. In Mark Alpert’s “The Triangular Universe,” we have a clear development along the lines I’ve been discussing. It is a brief essay (really a notice) challengingly subtitled “Instead of String Theory, Four-Dimensional Tetrahedrons.” This reference is problematic because the tetrahedron is a three-dimensional object. I’d like to see physics have the metaphorological courtesy of comprehending the allegory of Euclid before jumping right to the meta-metaphor of four-dimensional objects. Nonetheless, Alpert begins by exhorting that we imagine a landscape composed of microscopic triangular structures that constantly rearrange themselves into new patterns. Seen from afar, the landscape looks perfectly smooth, but up close it is a churning cauldron of strange geometries. This deceptively simple model is at the heart of a new theory called causal dynamical triangulation (CDT), which has emerged as a promising approach to solving the most vexing problem in physics—unifying the laws of gravity with those of quantum mechanics.40 The crafters of the theory—Renate Loll of Utrecht University, Jan Ambjørn of Copenhagen University, and Jerzy Jurkiewicz of Jagiellonian University—put it in the service of understanding things like the changing rates of the expanding universe; but, at core, they claim to be extending the discourse of quantum physics in the understanding of the most elementary structures on the scale of nano-reality. Their direct explanation of the concept, aired in a more recent issue of Scientific American, demonstrates that the absolutely reduced fabric of matter conforms to the interlocking and pulsing geometry of space-time itself, rather than of matter or energy once thought to “occupy” space-time.41 If we want a metaphor for the littlest, nano-scaled things that constitute matter, energy, and space-time, we must conceive of a myriad of ultratiny (existing down at the scale of the

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Planck scale, or 1.616 3 10-35 meters), triangle-shaped or triangle-sided tetrahedral, or rather, tetrahedron-sided hyper-tetrahedra (just as a fourdimensional hypercube is “sided” with three-dimensional cubes and not so much two-dimensional squares that side only a solid cube). These alter and inflate at pico-second rates to weave, moment to moment, the fabric of space-time and the evanescent quanta that are the seeming building blocks of matter. The impeccable visual support of Scientific American’s artistic arm aids well in grasping this abstruse hypergeometrical idea, although Loll, Ambjørn, and Jurkiewicz proffer the dense mathematics in other venues.42 If matter or energy might be said to be constituted by space-time at the smallest of physical scales, then space-time’s geometry is not a congeries of amorphous quantum fluctuations (such is the notion of nano-space or nano-gravity as a so-called quantum foam) but a dynamically twisting and flattening, piling and unfolding, ballooning and contracting fretwork of tetrahedra all latticed together on their triangular “bottom” surfaces (hence, “causal dynamical triangulation,” or CDT). If allegory has been called the discourse of the ineffable, then allegory is an apt term for postmodern physics’s most fundamental, tiniest of structures comprising the CDT theory, which certainly constitute a domain of supersensuous, meta-experiential abstractions that seem to violate the quotidian quality required by Bronowski of workable science.43 And in the case of the progression of the disciplinary narrative that I’ve traced in this short summation—from Thomson and Rutherford, through Nambu and Witten, and through Loll, Ambjorn, and Jurkiewicz—the metametaphorics of one-dimensional to two-dimensional to three-dimensional to four-dimensional objects used in explaining the most fundamental, littlest structures of the universe allegorizes the original progression or hierarchy of geometrical objects organized by Euclid himself. Still, the latest allegorical models of fundamental physics continue to grow more and more abstruse as artifacts of the ineffable, the sheerly indefinable. This is part and parcel of even literary allegory, of allegory construed as an object of interest still alive in the humanities.44 We have indeed witnessed a reinscribing, at a historically much later narrative level, of the very hierarchy constituting Euclid’s geometry in the Elements. And so, mine is a simple thesis, really, about persistent analogization using ascending ladders of key metaphors. The framework of my own analogical narrative underlying this allegory of Euclid has its own tendentious turns, but I think it nicely shows how an older discursive formation

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gets rendered rhetorically as an imaginative sensuous narrative, even in its sequential entirety, and recast at a subsequent imagistic level, a level that is systematically (and laterally) correspondential. The objects of study in science are real, but we often now know them only as arcane and ineffable mathematical models that sprout fanciful hypergeometries. I hope to have shown what Kuhn or Bronowski or Holton had always continued to assert: The mechanism of discovery and final formulation in mathematics, in science, is rhetorical or tropological and not transparent. And I think there is no device, no mode in literary rhetoric more promising (though more mysterious and exciting) for articulating this mechanism than allegory. Notes 1.  Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 88. 2.  The etymological defining of the word allegory itself marks what I call the requisitely philological “ground zero.” See, for instance, Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964), 2 (note 1), whom I follow in this philological spirit. 3.  Science and Human Values, rev. ed. (Harper, Row and Publishers, 1965; first pub. 1956), 13–14. Following Bronowski’s sudden death in 1974, his posthumously assembled collection, The Visionary Eye: Essays in the Arts, Literature, and Science, selected and ed., Piero E. Ariotti and Rita Bronowski (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1978), remained faithful to this early and pioneering, crossdisciplinary, and synthetic formulation (see esp. 20–32) that, according to Rita Bronowski, really “opened the two-cultures debate” (“Introduction,” Visionary Eye, vii)—an achievement that we now tend to ascribe to Snow (The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1959). 4.  The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970). 5.  Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought: Kepler to Einstein, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988; first pub. 1973). Just as Bronowski remained faithful to his original vision concerning the metaphoric constitution of scientific thought, so Holton holds faith with his own thematic model; see his more recent Science and Anti-Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), in which he develops the concept of imagistic themata into one of “dramatic” personae who flesh out said themes in a paradigmatically new scientific proposition. Brian Rotman has achieved a similar, though more thoroughly “semiotic,” version of the dramatic model in his understanding of the variously imaginary entities that could be said to constitute the stages or levels of mathematical production (mathematical “subject,” “person,” and “agent”—the last of which he actually designates a daemon, reminiscent of Fletcher’s ubiquitous ­a llegorical

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­ aemon, though without acknowledgement of Fletcher). See Ad Infinitum: The d Ghost in Turing’s Machine; Taking God out of Mathematics and Putting the Body Back In (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 65–87. I have developed Rotman’s model in my reading of Johannes Kepler’s division of mathematical or scientific cognition in his final treatise, Somnium; see James J. Paxson, “Kepler’s Allegory of Containment, the Making of Modern Astronomy, and the Semiotics of Mathematical Thought,” Intertexts 3 (1999): 105–123. 6.  I allude here to the more recent work by Jeanne Fahnestock, who shows, for instance, that Newton, in formulating a theory of gravity, effectively invoked the figure of chiasmus or reversal: Rhetorical Figures in Science (New York and Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1999), especially Chapter 4, 122–155. 7.  Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, trans. and ed. H. E. Butler, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1920), 8.6.44. 8.  See Bruce T. Clarke’s Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); see also his Allegories of Writing: The Subject of Metamorphosis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995) for precursory formulations that trace the Lucretian scientific attitude through the allegorical and mythographic matrix of Ovidian-styled transformation literature from antiquity to modern science fiction. 9.  See my article, “The Allegory of Temporality and the Early Modern Calculus,” in a cluster for the journal Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology 4.1 (1996), 39–66, guest-edited by Clarke. 10.  For instance, see E. A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (1925; New York: Dover Publications, 2003), which posits the “radical break” notion regarding prior and succeeding scientific texts, models, and paradigms. 11.  See Aristotle, The Physics, trans. P. H. Wicksteed and F. M. Cornford, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), IV.8–10. 12.  Sir Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy and His System of the World, trans. Andrew Motte, 1729, rev. Florian Cajori (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947), 197–198; the statement is the famous “Proposition 75/Theorem 35.” See Relativity: The Special and General Theory, trans. Robert W. Lawson (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1961), 108–110. 13.  See Quintilian 9.2.45–51 for his full discussion of the trope irony. 14.  A complete yet beautiful and well-annotated English-language edition of Euclid is The Elements, trans. Sir Thomas L. Health, intro. Andrew Aberdein (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2006; first pub. 1908). 15.  The surplus or excess or supplementarity of the allegorical sign seems to be the one feature all theories of the mode or effect have in common. The matter thus invokes the supplementarity of all sign-making systems, conceived from Plato through Derrida. 16.  The view was made infamous by Paul de Man in his seminal essay, “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” See Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, second rev. ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 207.

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17.  De Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979), 201–202. 18.  The Allegory of Love: A Study in Mediaeval Tradition (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1936), 45–46. 19.  See Quintilian, cf. note 7 above. 20.  See my “Allegory of Temporality,” 45–46. 21.  For a fascinating (and delightful) cultural history of the logarithm and its links to the modern sliderule, see Clyde B. Clason, Delights of the Slide Rule (New York: Thomas Crowell Company, 1964). 22.  Morris Kline, Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 236. 23.  Paxson, “Allegory of Temporality,” 46–47. 24.  Fahnestock, 143. 25.  Paxson, “Allegory of Temporality,” 44. 26.  Fahnestock, 147. 27.  Annalen der Physik 17 (June 30, 1905): 891–921. 28.  For a very interesting study on the discursivization of energy in early modern poetics (and which I take to be a nominal sequel to his 1964 book on allegory), see Fletcher, Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 29.  Fahnestock, 158. I single out Fahnestock’s elaborate discussion of ploche not to displace or compromise my assertion that allegory serves bilevel, analogical structures; rather, I speculate on what she might have suggested concerning what I’m trying to do concerning Euclideanism and physics’s search for fundamental structure inasmuch as her splendid book never treats allegoria at all—aside from recognizing it in a brief catalog (7), that it was one of the important tropes in the Rhetorica ad herennium, the Roman treatise nearly as important as Quintilian’s for ancient, medieval, and Renaissance poetics and oratory. 30.  Elements, 1; and see Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man (Toronto and Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1974), 163. 31.  Bronowski, Ascent of Man, 233. 32.  “On the Structure of the Atom: An Investigation of the Stability and Periods of Oscillation of a Number of Corpuscles Arranged at Equal Intervals around the Circumference of a Circle; with Application of the Results to the Theory of Atomic Structure,” Philosophical Magazine, Series 6, 7.39 (March 1904): 237–265. 33.  See E. N. da C. Andrade, Rutherford and the Nature of the Atom (New York: Doubleday, 1964). 34.  “The Existence of a Neutron,” Proceedings of the Royal Society 136 (1932): 692–708. 35.  See Niels Bohr, Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge (New York: Science Editions, 1961). 36.  Bronowski, Ascent of Man, 364. 37.  See essays in Paul Davies and Julian R. Brown, ed., Superstrings: A Theory of Everything (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1992) for general

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i­ntroduction; Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2003) for what is probably the most popular guide to the subject for nonscientists; Edward Witten, “The Universe on a String,” Astronomy Magazine (June 2002); and Leonard Susskind, The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design (Little, Brown & Company, 2006). 38.  See Michael J. Duff, “M-Theory (the Theory Formerly Known as Strings),” International Journal of Modern Physics A, 11 (1996): 5623–5642; and Edward Witten, “Magic, Mystery and Matrix,” Notices of the AMS (October 1998): 1124–1129. 39.  See Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), 97–155, for discussion of the essential “pre-text” in the allegorical literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The works of Chaucer, Spenser, and many other writers represent often the rewriting, allegorically, of the ancient world’s two most prominent pre-texts needing reappropriation, reinscription—the Bible and Vergil’s Aeneid. Although Jacob Bronowski nonchalantly records that Euclid’s Elements was the Middle Ages’ most reproduced text after the Bible, its life as a classical pre-text is secured in that, although it is not referred to directly in the most au courant of modern scientific or mathematical studies, it possesses a structure that has been getting allegorically reconfigured as the matrix of our new field’s narrative history, or rather, the field’s successionist historical narratology of fundamental structures according to my argument in this essay. 40.  Mark Alpert, “The Triangular Universe,” Scientific American 296, 2 (February 2007): 24. 41.  “The Self-Organizing Quantum Universe,” Scientific American 299, 1 (July 2008): 42–49. 42.  See J. AmbjØrn, J. Jurkiewicz, and R. Loll, “Quantum Gravity: The Art of Building Spacetime,” Approaches to Quantum Gravity: Toward a New Understanding of Space, Time and Matter, Daniele Oriti, ed. (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2009): 341–359. 43.  Visionary Eye, 28. 44.  Thomas Maresca, “Saying and Meaning: Allegory and the Indefinable,” Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 83 (1974): 248–261.

INDEX

Abbot, George, 73 abortion, 48, 59n40 advertising, 27, 29–30, 32 Aesop’s fables, 10 Al-Jazeera, 49 Alpert, Mark: “The Triangular Universe,” 259 Ambjørn, Jan, 259–60 Anderson, Benedict: Imagined Communities, 160n30; on time and printing, 155–56 antisemitism, 57n25 Antoine, Pierre-Joseph: Série des colonnes, 160n33 Aquinas, Thomas 2 architecture, 7, 122, 142–47; allegory in, 142–43, 144–46, 147, 148–50, 158; architectural criticism, 2, 5, 143–47, 158; and community, 155–58; orders of columns, 142–43; vs. printing, 150, 157–58, 158n2; proposals for urban monuments in Paris, 146–49; as public art, 150–52; sensationalist architectural theory, 160n33. See also museums Arendt, Hannah: The Human Condition, 238, 244, 245; on Kant, 239, 242–43, 245; Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 242–43; Life of the Mind, 2, 6–7, 237–48; on literality vs. figurality, 237, 238–42, 243, 245, 246–48; on the mouth/ speech and mental activities, 237, 238–42, 243–44, 248; on philosophical metaphor, 237–42, 248; on poetic language, 239; on speech and action, 237, 238, 244, 246–48; on speech and politics, 237, 242–45; on taste, 242–43, 245; and uncertain figurality, 238, 245, 246–48 Ariosto, Ludovico, 204; on Daphne, 191; Galileo on, 68–69; Orlando furioso, 68

Aristotle, 3, 18; on four causes, 13–15; on gravity, 251; on grief and mourning, 91; on matter, 14, 216; on metaphor, 239; Metaphysics, 13–15; Physics, 13–15, 251; Poetics, 88; Rhetoric, 91 Arnauld, Antoine, 79 Aron, Raymond, 135 Artaud, Antonin, 39; The Theater and Its Double, 55n9 art criticism, 144 Asman, Carrie L., 111n1 Aubigné, Agrippa d’: Les Tragiques, 21 Augustine, St., 212, 213, 231; on allegory, 1–2, 67, 75, 82n19; Confessions, 47, 55n13; on creation ex nihilo, 215; on literal meaning, 13, 67, 75, 82n19; on memory, 47, 55n13; On the Trinity, 13; on sin, 209; and Virgil’s Dido, 170, 171 Austen, Jane: Pride and Prejudice, 17 Auster, Paul, 29–30; New York Trilogy, 30; Oracle Night, 30 Austin, J. L., 47 Bachaumont, Louis Petit de, 151 Bacon, Francis: on Adam’s fall, 209, 211–12, 217, 228, 230, 231; Advancement of Learning, 6, 209–10, 211–13, 220, 222; on Atalanta and Hippomenes, 220; on Ceres and Proserpina, 218, 219, 220, 223; “Coelum, or the Origin of Things,” 215–16, 232; “Cupid, or the Atom,” 215–16, 225; on Dionysus, 220–21, 230, 231; on Echo, 219–20, 222, 223–34; Foucault on, 79; on free will, 213–14; on God and nature, 217; on human knowledge, 211–13, 215, 219–20, 223; on Iambe, 219–20, 231; on Idols of the Cave, Tribe, Marketplace, and Theater, 222, 230; and materiality,

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Bacon, Francis (continued) 6, 209–10, 215–16, 217–18, 220, 225, 233n7; vs. Milton, 3, 6, 209–10, 211, 212, 213–16, 217, 218–19, 220–26, 227, 228, 230, 231, 232n3, 233nn4,7, 234nn16,18; Novum Organum, 220; “Pan, or Nature,” 216–20, 228; on philosophy and rhetoric, 212; on Providence, 218; on Pygmalion, 223–24, 231; on the Scholastics, 220, 223; on Scylla, 220, 221–22, 223, 224, 225, 230, 231, 234n19; on sin, 209, 211–12, 213–15; on tyranny and superstition, 222; and Vico, 211; Wisdom of the Ancients, 209–10, 215, 216–21; on Zeus and birth of Athena, 223 Badiou, Alain, 81n7 Ballard, J. G., 27, 31 Bastide, Jean-François de: La Petite Maison, 160n33 Baudelaire, Charles-Pierre, 16 Baudrillard, Jean, 47, 58n37 Bayless, Martha: Parody in the Middle Ages, 56n15 Beckett, Samuel, 31 Bender, John, 81n7 Benjamin, Walter, 2, 31; on allegory, 78, 88–90, 91–93, 105, 124–25, 185, 208–9; on the Baroque idea of history, 25, 78; on death, 88, 92, 93, 105; on Hamlet, 92, 208–9; Illuminations, 56n19; on melancholy, 88, 89–90, 91, 112n16; on Novalis, 24; The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 87–93, 111; on Paris arcades, 124–25; on the Renaissance, 77, 78; on status of knowledge, 6; on tragedy, 4, 87–88, 90, 111n1; on Trauerspiele, 4, 22–24, 87–93, 111 Berger, Harry, Jr., 254; on Amoret’s torture, 167 Berkeley, George: Dialogues, 28 Bernard Silvestris: Cosmographia, 13 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo: Apollo and Daphne, 191, 195; Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, 194–95 Bess of Hardwick: initials “ES,” 183 bestiality, 47–48, 53–54, 58n38 Bible, the: interpretation of, 1, 10, 14, 66–67, 75; James 1:13–15, 214, 220; Leviticus 12:2–8, 44; Mosaic law, 44; as pre-text, 264n39 bilevel model of allegory, 252–54, 256, 263n29 Blake, William, 231 Blanchot, Maurice, 136

Bloch, Marc: on King’s Touch, 15 Block, Ned Joel: Imagery, 81n7 Bloom, Harold: Anxiety of Influence, 45, 58n31 Blow, John: Venus and Adonis, 106 Boccaccio, Giovanni: Semiramis in De Claris Mulieribus, 169 Boethius, 164 Boissard, Jean-Jacques, 195, 196 Bonnefoy, Yves, 136 Booth, Wayne C.: A Rhetoric of Irony, 55n15 Borges, Jorge Luis, 47, 58n37 Borinski, Karl, 23 Born, Max, 257 Botticelli, Sandro: Mars and Venus, 199–200 Braithwait, Richard, 114n30 Bredekamp, Horst: Galilei der Künstler, 82n11; “Gazing hands and Blind Spots,” 82n11, 83n24 Broglie, Louis de, 257 Bronowski, Jacob, 250, 257, 260, 261, 261nn3,5, 264n39 Bronowski, Rita, 261n3 Bronzino, Agnolo: An Allegory with Venus and Cupid, 199 Brook, Peter: The Empty Space, 54n6 Brooks, Peter, 55n11 Brouwer, Luitzen, 17 Bruneau, Charles, 54n1 Bruno’s La Cena de le Cenari: and allegory, 6, 64, 74–76, 77–79, 80, 85n52; and biblical interpretation, 75–76; diagram in, 2, 3–4, 61–62, 64, 71–73, 74–75, 78, 80, 81n5, 84nn33,35,39, 85n45; dialogical form of, 62, 71; Frula, 73; and hermetic tradition, 74–75, 78–79, 85nn44,45; metaphor vs. truth in, 74, 75, 76, 77–78; and Oxford, 71, 73–74, 85nn41,44; reading and visualization in, 71; Smitho, 71, 74, 75–76; Teofilo and allegory, 75–76, 77, 85n51; Teofilo and mask of Copernicus, 71–73, 74; Torquato, 71–72 Buber, Martin, 211 Bunyan, John: Christian, 11; Christiana, 11; The Pilgrim’s Progress, 11 Burke, Edmund, 143, 231 Burke, Peter: Eyewitnessing, 57n31 Burtt, E. A., 251, 262n10 Byatt, A. S., 27 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 87, 89 Callistratus: Digest of Justinian, 38, 49, 54n4, 57n27, 59n40

inde x Calvino, Italo: If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, 30 Capek, Jaseph, 17 Capek, Karel: R.U.R., 17; War with the Newts, 17 capital punishment, 3, 38–50, 55n8, 56nn23,24, 59n40 Caplan, Harry, 58n32 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da: Amor as Victor, 189 Carnap, Rudolf, 20 Carruthers, Mary: The Book of Memory, 56n17 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 136 Catherine de’ Medici, 122, 138 Catholicism: Counter-Reformation, 21, 89, 155; doctrine of transubstantiation in, 208–9 Cavalli, Francesco, 106; Egisto, 107 Caygill, Howard, 89 Cela, Camilo Jose: The Hive, 16 Certeau, Michel de, 38, 55n8 Cervantes’s Don Quixote, 166, 183–84 Chadwick, James, 257 Charity, A. C., 13 Charles V, Emperor, 134–35 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 2, 264n39 chemistry: allotropes in, 19 Chenu, M. D., 13 Chettle, Henry: Tragedy of Hoffman, 92, 93 Chiappe, Andrew: on Shakespeare, 22, 33n10 Chirac, Jacques, 136, 137, 139 Christine de Pizan, 2, 3; and female agency, 165–66, 169–70, 171, 184–85; on Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose, 169, 171–72; rewriting of Dante by, 165–66, 169–71, 172; on written law, 169, 170; vs. Wroth, 5, 165–66, 184–85 Christine de Pizan’s Livre de la Cité des Dames: Dido, 169–71; Lady Reason, 171–72; Saint Christine, 172; Semiramis, 169–71, 172; three daughters of God, 163–64, 173 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 252; on allegory, 26, 33n16. See also Pseudo-Cicero Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration, 138–39 Cixous, Hélène, 136 Clarke, Bruce, 250, 256 Coetzee, J. M.: Foe, 31 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, 152

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colonialism. See Exposition Coloniale of 1931 commentaries, 12, 16 conspiracy and allegory, 29 Conway, Anne, 233n7 Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium: and biblical passages, 66–67; copy owned by Bruno, 84n36; copy owned by Galileo, 82n14, 83n32; cosmological diagram in, 3, 60, 61–62, 64, 65, 70–71, 71–73, 74, 78, 81n6, 83n32, 84nn35,39,40; and Euclidean geometry, 257; theological objections to, 75–76 Copleston, Frederick: History of Philosophy, 15 Counter-Reformation, 21, 89, 155 Croll, Oswald, 78, 86n56 Croxton Play of the Sacrament, 54n1 daemonic agency, 9–10, 27–28, 29 Daeninckx, Didier: Cannibale, 140n5 Daniel, Samuel: Civil Wars, 22 Daniélou, Jean, 13 Danielson, Dennis: Milton’s Good God, 234n18 Dante’s Divine Comedy, 2, 10, 69; Beatrice, 11, 170; Francesca da Rimini, 131, 132, 164–66, 167, 168–71, 183; Paolo, 168, 169; Semiramis, 168–71; Virgil, 11, 167, 170, 172 Dauphiné, Joël: Canaques de la NouvelleCalédonie à Paris en 1931, 140n5 Davenant, Sir William: production of Macbeth, 106 death: Benjamin on, 88, 92, 93, 105; death penalty, 3, 37–50, 55n8, 56nn23,24, 59n40; Donne on, 94, 96; in drama, 88, 92, 93–94, 95–98, 100, 102–5, 110–11; in Ford’s Broken Heart, 95–98, 100, 102–5; Milton’s Death, 24, 209–10, 217, 221, 224, 228–29, 230, 233n7; rituals of, 94–95, 111, 114n30 deconstruction, 249, 252. See also Derrida, Jacques definitions: of allegory, 7, 10, 26, 39–40, 49, 238, 239, 249, 252, 261n2; and nominalism, 18–19 Defoe, Daniel, 31 De Gaulle, Charles, 135, 136 Delaney, Sheila, 171 Delany, Samuel, 31 Deleuze, Gilles, 81n7; The Fold, 249

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DeLillo, Don: The Names, 30; Underworld, 30; White Noise, 30 Della Porta, Giovani, 78 Della Terza, Dante, 69 De Lorris, Guillaume, 2 De Man, Paul, 2; on allegory, 65, 252; “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” 23, 262n16 Democritus, 256 Derrida, Jacques: crypt of, 46, 58n33; on différance, 13; Fors, 46, 58n33; Of Grammatology, 186n13, 208; on Rousseau, 208; on writing, 186n13, 208 Descartes, René, 79; on Fortune and Eternity, 104, 105; on souls and bodies, 104, 105 Dommergue, Gaston, 132 Donne, John: on Adam and Eve, 209; on death, 94, 96; First Anniversarie, 209, 232n2; Holy Sonnets #10, 195 Dostoyevski, Fyodor: The Possessed, 28 drama: allegory in, 78, 88–90, 91–93, 97–98, 100, 102–3, 106–7, 110–11; in baroque period, 4, 6, 22–24, 87–93; death in, 88, 92, 93–94, 95–98, 100, 102–5, 110–11; and melancholy, 88, 89–90, 91, 92, 94, 112n16; and mourning, 4, 88–90, 91, 92, 96, 97, 105, 110–11, 112n16 Drayton, Michael: The Barons’ Wars, 22 Dreyfus, Alfred, 133 Ducos de la Haille, Pierre: frescoes of, 124, 125, 127–28, 129–31, 138 Dupaigne, Bernard: Le Scandale des arts premiers, 141n16 Dürer, Albert: Triumph of the Emperor Maximilian, 125 Eco, Umberto: “Interpreting Drama,” 46, 55n8, 58n34 Eggert, Katharine: “Spenser’s Ravishment,” 186nn16,17 Eikon Basilike, 101 Einstein, Albert, 251, 255, 262n12 Elizabeth I: funeral of, 94–95; Montrose on, 168 Ellis, William, 55n9 English morality plays, 21 Enlightenment, the, 5, 25, 143 Erasmus, Desiderius, 128 essentialism, 15, 16–17 Euclidean geometry, 250, 251–52, 256–61, 263n29, 264n39 Euripides’ Trojan Women, 90

Exposition Coloniale of 1931, 121, 122–35; cultural dioramas at, 4–5, 125–26, 137, 140n5; “France Colonizing”/La France Colonisiatrice, 126; list of heroes on Musée des Colonies, 128–29; Lyautey’s opening address, 132–34; Musée des Colonies, 123–25, 126–32, 135–36, 138–39, 140n1 fables, 10, 25 Fahnestock, Jeanne: on chiasmus, 254–56, 262n6; on Newton and Faraday, 254–56; on ploche, 256, 263n29; Rhetorical Figures in Science, 254–56, 262n6 Fallon, Stephen, 210, 233n7 Faraday, Michael, 255–56 Fehér, Ferene, 111n1 female agency: and allegory, 5, 6, 163–64, 165, 166–68, 171–72, 180–83, 185; and Christine de Pizan, 165–66, 169–70, 171, 184–85; female gender of personifications, 5, 163–65, 166–69, 171–72, 173, 179, 181, 183, 185, 186n16; and incest, 168–69; and Spenser, 5–6, 195, 199–200; and Wroth, 165–66, 181, 183, 184–85 Ferry, Anne, 233n7 Ferry, Jules, 127 Ficino, Marsilio: De vita coelitus compa­ randa, 73; on Egyptian hieroglyphs, 88; on music, 109 Flaubert, Gustave, 27, 28 Fletcher, Angus: on allegorical daemon, 9–10, 25–28, 256, 261n5; Allegory, 55n8, 238, 261n2; on allegory and energia, 256; on allegory as protean device, 1, 7; on symbolic action, 55n8; Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare, 263n28; on uncertainty and figurative language, 238, 245 Fletcher-Lemasson, Penelope, 140n1 Fleury, Cardinal André-Hercule de, 150 Ford, Henry: on the assembly line, 256 Ford, John: Love’s Sacrifice, 92, 95; ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, 115n37 Ford’s Broken Heart, 4, 92; allegory and mimesis in, 97–98, 100, 102–3, 111; ­Bassanes, 96, 103; Calantha, 96, 103, 105, 111; critical interpretations of, 114n31; death in, 95–98, 100, 102–5; vs. Dido and Aeneas, 3, 93, 111; Ithocles, 95–96, 100, 102–3; Orgilus, 86, 98, 100, 103; Penthea, 95–96, 97–98, 102, 103–4, 111

inde x Foucault, Michel: Discipline and Punish, 38; Les mots et les choses, 85n55; on the Renaissance, 6, 77, 78–79, 85n55; on similitude and episteme of representation, 78–79, 85n55; on status of knowledge, 6 France: and Algeria, 123, 135, 136; censorship in, 144; Enlightenment in, 5, 143; Fifth Republic, 135–36; Fourth Republic, 136; Henri IV, 120, 149; immigrants in, 138–39; and Indochina, 135; Jansenism in, 146; Louis IX, 128; Louis XIV, 120, 150; Louis XV, 145–46, 147, 149, 150–51, 159n17; Louis XVI, 147, 149; national vs. local culture in, 155–56; Parlement of Paris, 146, 147, 149, 150–51; Revolution of 1789, 121, 122; Revolution of 1830, 121; Royal Academy of Architecture, 156; Royal Academy of Art, 144; Third Republic, 121, 122, 127, 133, 134–35; ultramontanism in, 145–46; Vichy government, 138; Wars of Religion, 120, 149. See also Exposition Coloniale of 1931; museums; Paris fraud and allegory, 29 Frege, Gottlob, 17, 20 Frézier, Amedée-François, 154–55 Fried, Daniel: “Milton and Empiricist Semiotics,” 232n3 Funkenstein, Amos: Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 86n57 Furtenagel, Lucas: The Burgkmaier Spouses, 97 Gabriele, Mino, 84n33 Gadol, Joan Kelly, 165–66 Galileo Galilei: and circular movement, 69; Considerazioni al Tasso, 68; copy of De revolutionibus owned by, 82n14, 83n32, 84n36; Panofsky on, 68, 69, 83n24; on poetic-aesthetic allegory, 66, 68, 69, 70, 76, 77; on reading book of the universe, 69, 70, 75, 77, 83n31, 254; Il Saggiatore, 68–69, 83n31; on sensory observation and reason, 66–67, 70, 77; Sidereus Nuncius, 82n11, 257; on Tasso vs. Ariosto, 68–69, 83n24; and the telescope, 60; on textual allegory, 66, 68–69, 70, 76, 77; on theological allegory, 66–67, 70, 75, 76, 77 Galileo’s Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, 81n5; and allegory, 3–4, 6, 64, 65–71, 74, 77, 79–80, 82n19; diagram in, 2, 3–4, 61–62, 63, 64–65, 70–71, 77,

269

78, 81n5, 83n32, 84n35; dialogical form of, 62; personification in, 65; Salviati and diagram, 64–65, 71; Salviati and mask of Copernicus, 60–61, 65, 71, 79–80; Segredo, 60, 64, 65; Simplicio, 64–65, 65, 70 Gatti, Hilary, 85n45 Gauguin, Paul, 136 Geary, Patrick J.: Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages, 56n22 Gertsman, Elina, 57n29 Gewirtz, Paul, 55n11 Gheeraerts, Marcus, II,: Portrait of Captain Thomas Lee, 195–96, 198 Giacometti, Alberto, 136 Giehlow, Karl, 88 Gilbert, W. S.: The Mikado, 125 Gingerich, Owen, 82n14, 83n32, 84n36 Girard, René: on ritual, 46, 58n33; Violence and the Sacred, 58n33 God: as creator, 25; grace of, 230; omnipotence of, 12, 15; oneness of, 15; providence of, 12; as trinity, 163–64, 173 Godefroy de Bouillon, 128 Gödel, Kurt, 17 Goldberg, Jonathan: Endless Work, 186n16 Golding, William: The Inheritors, 31 Gombrich, Ernst: “Icones Symbolicae,” 112n7 Goodman, Nelson, 32n7 Gordon, D. J.: The Renaissance Imagination, 115n44 Gosselin, Edward, 74, 85n44 Grassi, Oratio, 68 Greenblatt, Stephen, 40, 209 Greene, Brian: The Elegant Universe, 264n37 Greene, Thomas M.: “Magic and Festivity at the Renaissance Court,” 116n45 Greenlaw, Edwin, 254 Greeves, Mark: The Philosophical Status of Diagrams, 81n7 Gross, Kenneth, 211, 213 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich: Production of Presence, 58n33 Guyard, Guillaume, 47–48 Habermas, Jürgen: on political sphere and domestic sphere, 154 Hannay, Margaret: Philip’s Phoenix, 187n23 Harrington, John: on false religion, 231 Haussmann, Georges Eugène, 134 Heinsius, Daniel, 91, 105 hendiadys, 246–27

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Henri IV, 120, 149 Henry, Michael, 81n7 Herbert, William, 175, 176, 181, 186n19 Herbert of Cherbury, Lord, 186 hermetic thought, 29, 30, 69; and Bruno, 74–75, 78–79, 85nn44,45 Herodian, 114n30 hierarchical allegorical systems, 251–52, 256–57, 258–59, 260 Hill, Christopher: Milton and the English Revolution, 232n3; The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution, 232n3, 234n18 history: Baroque idea of, 25–26, 78; histo­ rical writing vs. allegory, 10 Hitler, Adolf: Mein Kampf, 133 Holbein, Hans, The Elder: An Allegory of Passion, 198 Holinshed’s Chronicles, 22 Holman, Peter: Henry Purcell, 115n40 Holton, Gerald, 250, 261; Science and AntiScience, 261n5 Homer, 1, 12, 68–69 Hope, Richard, 14 Houllebecq, Michel: Platforme, 132 Hoxby, Blair, 209; Mammon’s Music, 233n5 Hugo, Victor, 157 Huguenin, Jean François: Chronicles of the City of Metz, 44–45, 52–53, 56n23 Hupper, George: “Divinatio et Eruditio,” 86n57 Husserl, Edmund, 62 idolatry, 211, 213–14 Iraq, 49–50 irony, 40, 55n15, 251 Iser, Wolfgang: The Fictive and the Imaginary, 58n34 Jackson, W. T. H.: on personification, 57n30 James I: funeral of, 95 Janniot, Alfred: bas-relief for the Musée des Colonies, 124, 125, 127, 128 Jansenism, 146, 150 Jarrassé, Dominique: on the Musée des Colonies, 126, 127 Jauss, Hans Robert, 50, 58n34; Question and Answer, 58n34 Javoukey, Anna Marie, 129 Jean de Meun. See Roman de la Rose, Le Jurkiewicz, Jerzy, 259–60 justice, 55n8

Kafka, Franz, 25–26, 30 Kahn, Victoria, 209; Machiavellian Rhetoric, 233n5 Kames, Lord: on grief, 111 Kamuf, Peggy: Fictions of Feminine Desire, 58n33 Kant, Immanuel, 239; Arendt on, 242–43, 245; Critique of Judgment, 242–43; on taste, 242–43, 245 Kennedy, John F.: rhetoric of, 255 Kepler, Johannes, 65, 68, 69, 82n16; Somnium, 262n5 Kerchache, Jacques, 136–37, 141n16 Kevorkian, Jack, 49 Kirchman, Johann, 114n30 Klapisch-Zuber, Christine, 57n29 Kleist, Heinrich von, 23 Kline, Morris, 253 KQED v. Daniel Vasquez, 48, 58n39 Kriesten, Uta, 140n1 Kristeva, Julia, 244 Kubiak, Anthony: Stages of Terror, 58n33 Kuhn, Thomas: on paradigms, 250, 251, 261 Lacou-Labarthe, Philippe, 136 La Font de Saint-Yenne, Étienne de, 155; on church of Saint-Sulpice, 144–46; L’Ombre du Grand Colbert, 152–54 language: ambiguity of, 28; role of allegory in, 6, 7–8 Laprade, Albert: Musée Permanent des Colonies, 123–24, 138 Laruelle, François, 81n7 Lear, Jonathan, 13 LeBlanc, H.: Architecture des Églises Anciennes et Nouvelles, 154–55 Le Camus d Mezières, Nicolas: Le génie de l’architecture, 160n33 Lee, Captain Thomas, 195–96, 198 legal systems: death penalty, 3, 37–50, 55n8, 56nn23,24, 59n40; legal representation, 38–39; ostension/exhibits, 39, 47, 55n9 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 255 Leiris, Michel, 136 Lerner, Lawrence, 74, 85n44 Lesseps, Ferdinand de, 129 Lesser, Wendy, 58n39 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 186n13; on incest, 168, 169; on laws of kinship structure, 167, 169 Lewis, C. S., 252, 254 Liar’s Paradox, 16

inde x Libération, 136, 137 literal meaning, 20–21, 39–40, 41; Arendt on literality vs. figurality, 237, 238–42, 243, 245, 246–48; vs. spiritual meaning, 12–13, 20, 66–67, 75–76. See also nominalism Locke, John, 26 Loll, Renate, 259–60 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 26 Louis IX (Saint Louis), 128 Louis XIV, 120, 150 Louis XV, 145–46, 147, 149, 150, 159n17 Louis XVI, 147, 149 Louvre: Musée du Louvre, 135, 136, 137; Palais du Louvre, 150–51, 152–54; vs. Versailles, 150, 151 Lovejoy, A. O.: on the Great Chain of ­Being, 22–23 Lubac, Henri de, 12, 13 Lucretius, 256, 262n8 Lukács, Georg: “The Ideology of Modernism,” 25–26 Lutheranism, 89 Lüthy, Cristoph, 84n33 Lyautey, Louis Hubert Gonsalve, 132–34 Lyotard, Jean-François, 136 Machosky, Brenda, 140n1 Malraux, André: and Musée Nationale des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, 135–36, 137 Mann, Thomas, 26 Marie de Medici, 120 Marlowe, Christopher: Doctor Faust, 212; Mephistophilis, 21 Marrinan, Michael, 81n7 Marvell, Andrew: The Garden, 19 Marxism, 26; Marx on commodity fetishism, 124–25 masques, 22, 107, 109, 115n44 Masson, David, 232n3 materiality, 32, 174; of allegorical figures, 5, 6, 28–29, 164–65, 167, 171, 172, 179, 209–10, 215–16, 217–18, 220, 225, 226–32, 233n7; Aristotle on, 14, 216; of diagrams, 62–64; and Trauerspiele, 23–24 mathematics, 7, 20, 69; diagrams in, 62–64; Napier’s invention of logarithms, 253, 254; and Plato, 17. See also Euclidean geometry Maxwell, Clerk, 255, 256 McMullin, Ernan: “Bruno and Copernicus,” 84n39

271

McNulty, Robert, 73 memory, 37, 38, 39, 40–42, 45, 48, 49, 56n17 Mercier, Louis Sebastien, 143 Mercure de France, 154, 159n18 metaphor: extended metaphor, 238, 239, 250, 252–53; metaphoric continuation, 26, 28, 33n16 Meursius, Jan, 114n30 Michelangelo Buonarroti: Ganymede, 189; Leda and the Swan, 189 Middle Ages: allegory during, 2, 3, 12–15, 37–50, 88–89, 124, 127, 163–64, 165–66; Benjamin on, 88–89, 90; death penalty during, 3, 37–50, 55n8, 56nn23,24; exegesis during, 10, 12–15, 20; fourfold system of reading during, 12–15, 20, 25, 26, 31; pageants during, 2; personification during, 163–64; vs. Renaissance, 165–66 Middleton, Robin, 160n33 Middleton, Thomas: The Lady’s Tragedy, 92, 95; The Revenger’s Tragedy, 92, 93–94 Miller, Water: A Canticle for Leibowitz, 11 Milton, John: Areopagitica, 209, 210, 212, 214, 233n5; vs. Bacon, 3, 6, 209–10, 211, 212, 213–16, 217, 218–19, 220–26, 227, 228, 230, 231, 232n3, 233nn4,7, 234nn16,18; on contraries, 216; Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 222, 225; on free will, 209, 210–11, 213–14, 222–23, 234n18; on God, 24, 217, 218, 219; on good and evil, 210, 216; on human knowledge, 6, 212, 215, 218–19, 222; and materiality, 209–10, 215–16, 217–18, 225, 226–32, 233n7; Naturam Non Pati Senium, 218; On Education, 219; on reason, 210–11; on temptation, 213; on tyranny and superstition, 222 Milton’s Paradise Lost, 222–32; Beelzebub, 223; Chaos and creation, 215–16, 224–25, 228–29, 232, 234n16; Daemons in, 28; daughters of Cain, 222, 231; Death, 24, 209–10, 217, 221, 224, 228–29, 230, 233n7; Discord, 228; Eden, 218–19, 228, 229; Error and Custome, 222, 225; the fall, 209, 210–11, 214, 219, 228, 230–31; Satan, 28, 210, 212, 213, 214, 219, 220–21, 223, 225–30; Sin, 24, 209–10, 215, 217, 220, 221, 223, 224–25, 228–29, 230, 233n7, 233n9, 234n19

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mimesis and allegory, 92; in Ford’s Broken Heart, 97–98, 100, 102–3, 111; in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, 106–7, 110–11 Mirror for Magistrates, The, 21–22 Mittérand, François, 121, 139 Monteverdi, Claudio: “Lament of the Nymph,” 106–7, 115n41 Montrose, Louis, on Elizabeth I, 168 Moore, Robert Etheridge: Henry Purcell & the Restoration Theatre, 115n40 moral meaning, 12–13 Morocco, 132, 133, 134 Morris, Errol: Mr. Death, 48 Moss, Jean Dietz: Novelties in the Heavens, 83n19 Mullarkey, John: “Thinking in Diagrams”/ Post-Continental Philosophy, 81n7 museums, 1, 2; Musée de l’Homme, 136, 139, 141n16; Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens/Palais de la Porte Dorée, 135–38, 139; Musée des Colonies, 123–25, 126–32, 135–36, 138–39, 140n1; Musée du Louvre, 135, 136, 137; Musée du Quai Branly, 4, 137, 139, 139n, 141n16 music, 20, 24; and passions, 106–8. See also Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas mystery plays, 2, 88 mysticism, 24–25 Nambu, Yochiro, 258 N.A.P.: “Si loin, si proche,” 135, 141n13 Napier, John, 253, 254 nationalism, 4, 7 Neill, Michael, 115n37 Neoplatonism, 165, 174 Netz, Reviel: on diagrams and proof, 63–64 Newcombe, Lori Humphrey, 187n25 Newman, Barbara: on feminine gender of personifications, 163–64, 173 Newton, Isaac, 250, 251; and the calculus, 255, 257; and Euclidean geometry, 257; on gravity, 262n6; Third Law of Motion, 254–56 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 111n1; on memory, 38 Nirenberg, David: Communities of Violence, 57n25 nominalism: and changes in meaning, 20; of Ockham, 3, 17–18, 19, 25, 29, 30, 32; of Quine, 3, 18–19, 21, 32n7; vs. realism, 17–21, 25–26, 28, 29–32, 32n7 Nouvel, Jean, 139

obscurity and allegory, 24–25 Oliver, Isaac: Allegory of Unchaste Love, 206–7; Edward Herbert, First Lord of Cherbury, 194, 198; Nymphs and Satyrs, 205–6 Ong, Walter: “From Allegory to Diagram in the Renaissance Mind,” 82n11 Ontology of the page, Baroque, 64, 77–80 Ophir, Adi, 85n45 Orgel, Stephen: The Illusion of Power, 115n44 Orwell, George, 21; Animal Farm, 10, 17; 1984, 16, 17 Ovid’s Metamorphese, 179, 262n8; Arethusa and Byblis, 179; Pygmalion, 179, 187n25; Scylla, 224, 234n19 Pagès, Jean: dialog regarding cathedral in Amiens, 156–58, 160n32 Panofsky, Erwin: on Galileo, 68, 69, 83n24 parables, 10, 25, 30 Paracelsus, 78 Paris: arcades in, 124–25; Avenue Daumesnil, 122–23; Avenue des Champs Elysées, 120, 122, 133; Bercy, 119; Bibliothèque Nationale, 121, 139; Bois de Boulogne, 119, 120, 126; Bois de Vincences, 119–20, 123, 126; east vs. west Paris, 119–22, 133, 136, 137, 139; Eiffel Tower, 122, 130, 133, 139; eleventh arrondissement, 121; Elysée Palace, 120; Exposition Universelle of 1889, 122; Exposition Universelle of 1900, 122; Faubourg Saint-Antoine, 120, 121, 140n2; “Genius of Liberty,” 121; Grand Palais, 122, 126; Haussmanization of, 134; Institute du Monde Arabe, 139; Ministry of Economy and Industry, 121; Musée du Quai Branly, 4, 137, 139, 139n; Omisports Palace, 121; Opéra de la Bastille, 121; Palais de Justice, 147–49; Petit Palais, 122; Place de la Bastille, 121; Place Vendôme, 120; Pompidou Center, 139; Porte Dorée, 123; proposals for urban monuments in, 146–49; Radio and Television Commission, 121; Rue de la Roquette, 121; Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, 120; Saint-Sulpice, church of, 144–46; sixteenth arrondissement/ Faubourg Saint-Honoré, 120, 140n2; and socialist government, 121; thirteenth arrondissement, 121; twelfth arrondissement, 120; westward flow of Seine River,

inde x 119; working class in, 133–34. See also Exposition Coloniale of 1931; Louvre; museums patriarchy, 5, 168–69 Paul, St., 231 Paulson, Ronald, 231–32 Pépin, Jean, 13 Perrard de Montreuil, François-Victor: proposal for reconstruction of Palais de Justice, 147–49 personification, 37, 40, 65, 130, 184, 250, 255; and capture, 131–32; female gender of personifications, 5, 163–65, 166–69, 171–72, 173, 179, 181, 183, 185, 186n16; and materiality, 6, 28–29, 164–65, 167, 171, 172, 179, 209–10, 233n7; nouns in romance languages, 164, 165; PseudoCicero on, 45–46, 58n32; relationship to allegory, 45, 57n30; Teskey on, 164–65, 166–69, 171, 173, 179, 183, 185, 186n16; and theology, 163–64, 173 Perucci, Francesco, 114n30 Petrarch, 175; blazon, 176; Trionfi, 102 phenomenology, 62 Philippe de Vigneulles: Chronicles, 37–38, 41, 43–44, 50–51, 54n1, 56nn23,24, 57n25; Memoirs/Gedenkbuch, 41–42, 49, 51–52, 57n25 Philo of Alexandria, 1 philosophy: allegorical structure in, 2, 6–7, 237–42, 248; and diagrammatic reasoning, 65, 81n7 physics: brane theory, 258–59; causal dynamical triangulation (CDT), 259–60; and Euclidean geometry, 250, 251–52, 256–61, 263n29, 264n39; and four basic forces of nature, 258; quantum mechanics, 257–58, 259, 260; role of allegory in, 249–51, 254–61; as search for fundamental structures, 256–61, 263n29, 264n39; string theory, 258–59, 263n17; successionist model of, 251–52, 256–61, 264n39. See also Bruno’s La Cena de le Cenari; Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium; Galileo Galilei; Galileo’s Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo; Kepler, Johannes; Newton, Isaac Picasso, Pablo, 136 pictorialization, 38–39, 40–41, 45, 47–48, 49–50 Plato: Laws, 38–39; and mathematics, 17; on matter, 215; Meno, 65; Republic, 19; Sym-

273

posium, 128; theory of ideas, 15, 16–23, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31; Timaeus, 215 poetry, 11, 20–21, 239, 247 politics, 9–10, 29; Arendt on speech and, 237, 242–45 Pompidou, Georges, 139 Porcacci, Thomaso, 114n30 postmodernism, 27–29, 249, 252 power relations, 9–10, 17, 23, 26–28, 29, 32 Price, Curtis, 109; Henry Purcell and the London Stage, 115n40 printing vs. architecture, 150, 157–58, 158n2 Protestantism, 208 Proust, Marcel, 132–33 Pseudo-Cicero, 55n14; on allegory, 39–40; on memory, 40–41; on personification, 45–46, 58n32 Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, 3, 4, 93, 105–11; Aeneas, 108, 109–10; Belinda, 107–8; dances in, 107, 108–9, 110; Dido, 106, 107–11; final lament of Dido, 106, 109, 110, 111; vs. Ford’s Broken Heart, 3, 93, 111; ground bass in, 106–7, 109, 110; keys/modes in, 100, 106, 107–8, 109; mimesis and allegory in, 106–7, 110–11; Sorceress and wayward sisters, 108 Quilligan, Maureen, 233n7; on pre-texts, 259, 264n39 Quine, W. V.: nominalism of, 3, 18–19, 21, 32n7 Quintilian, 47, 56n22; on allegory as extended metaphor, 250, 252–53; on deploying vision, 42; on eyewitnessing, 57n31; Institutio oratoria, 33n16, 252–53, 263n29 Rang, Florens, 111n1 Read, Alan: Theatre and Everyday Life, 55n8 realism: vs. allegory, 10, 16; in literature, 16 Recipon, Georges: “Eternity Overcoming Time,” 122, 126; “Harmony Overcoming Discord,” 122, 126 Reeves, Eileen, 67; “Augustine and Galileo on Reading the Heavens,” 82n19; Painting the Heavens, 82n11, 83n24 Reformation, the, 2 Reims Cathedral, 154 religious propaganda, 27 Renaissance, the: allegory during, 5, 6, 88, 124–25, 164, 165–66; Benjamin on, 88, 90; end of, 77; Foucault on, 6, 77, 78–79, 85n55; vs. Middle Ages, 165–66; mourning and melancholy during, 112n16;

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Renaissance, the (continued) personification during, 164; poetry during, 11; status of knowledge during, 6; women during, 165–66 resemblance and allegory, 78–79 rhetoric, 9, 19, 37; chiasmus/antimetabole in, 254–56, 262n6; ostension in, 39, 47, 55; ploche in, 256, 263n29; prosopopoeia in, 255; Rhetorica ad Herennium, 39–41, 45–46, 55n14, 58n32, 263n29 Richards, I. A., 31 rituals, 11–12, 20; of death, 94–95, 111, 114n30; liminal rites, 90–91, 92, 94–95, 97, 111, 114n30; repetition of, 26–27, 28 Roach, Joseph, 114n30; Cities of the Dead, 55n10; on surrogation, 46, 55n10 Roberts, Josephine, 179, 183, 184, 186n19 Robinet, André: “Leibniz,” 86n57 Roman de la Rose, Le, 2, 131, 169; Deduit’s Garden of Love, 177; Lady Reason, 164, 171–72; Lord of Love, 181 Romano, Giulio: Palazzo Te, 125 Romanticism, 2, 23, 24, 29, 89, 208 Rome: Arch of Titus, 143; Lateran baptistery, 142–43; Saint Peter’s Basilica, 154 Rosen, Edward, 84n40 Rosenzweig, Franz, 111n1 Rotman, Brian, 261n5; on diagrams, 62, 63 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: Social Contract, 120; on speech and writing, 208 Rubens, Peter Paul: The Entombment, 97 Rubin, Gayle: on incest taboo, 168–69 Rubin, Miri: Gentile Tales, 57n25 rumination, 10–11 Rumsfeld, Donald, 49 Russell, Bertrand, 17, 32n7 Rutherford, Ernest, 257 Saiber, Arielle, 71, 84nn33, 37 Saint Paul’s Cathedral, 154 Saint-Sulpice, church of, 144–46 Saisselin, Remy: “Architecture and Language,” 160n33 Salon criticism, 144 Saramago, José: All the Names, 30 Sarkozy, Nicholas, 139 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 135 Schechner, Richard, 41 Scheler, Max, 111n1 science fiction, 11 scientific thought, 1, 25; Euclidean geometry, 250, 251–52, 256–61, 263n29,

264n39; literality in, 249; and Platonism, 17; role of allegory in, 2, 3–4, 7, 65–71, 75, 79–80, 249–61, 261n5; role of diagrams in, 2, 3–4, 62–65; role of observation and reasoning in, 66–67, 70, 77–78; and successionist model, 251–52, 256–61. See also physics Scruton, Roger, 18 secular consumerism, 27, 29–30 self-reflexivity, 10–11 Seneca, 88 September 11th attacks, 49 Septimus Severus: death and funeral of, 95, 114n30 Servandoni, Giovanni Niccolò: church of Saint Sulpice, 144–46 Shakespeare, William, 253; Antony and Cleopatra, 109; Benjamin on, 87, 92, 208–9; and Holinshed’s Chronicles, 22; Iago, 21; Sonnet #64, 10; Wall/Pyramus and Thisbe, 29; Winter’s Tale, 179 Shakespeare’s Hamlet: dialogue with gravediggers in, 92; and melancholy, 94 Shelley, Percy: on vitally metaphorical language, 239, 247 Shin, Sun-Joo: The Logical Status of Diagrams, 81n7 Sidney, Phillip: Argalus and Parthenia in Arcadia, 177, 187n23; Stella, 183 signifier vs. signified, 6, 10–11, 89, 124–25, 131–32, 252–53, 262n15 similarity and allegory, 78–79 Simpson, Nicole Brown, 49 slavery, 130 Smith, Theresa, 85n40 Snow, C. P., 250; The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, 261n3 Solger, Karl, 24–25, 29 Sophocles: Ajax, 90; Philoctetes, 90 Spenser, Edmund, 2, 3, 23, 253, 264n39; Amoretti, 176; and Elizabeth I, 167–68; Epithalamion, 194; and female agency, 5–6, 195, 199–200; and history, 22; on House of Pride, 128, 191, 193–94; on idolatry, 211; and knights, 5–6, 188, 191, 193, 195–96, 198–200, 207; “Mutabiltie Cantos,” 177 Spenser’s Faerie Queene, 125, 127; Acrasia, 186n17, 199, 200, 202, 205; Amoret and Scudamore, 193; Amoret’s torture by Busirane, 164–68, 169, 170, 173–76, 177, 179, 181, 184, 186nn16,17; Apollo and

inde x Daphne, 195; Archimago and Redcrosse Knight, 182, 193, 194; Bower of Bliss, 191, 199, 206; Britomart, 167–68, 174, 175, 176, 177, 184, 186n17, 188, 191, 193, 198–99, 203–4; Sir Burbon, 120; Calidore and Pastorella, 193–94; Chrysogone, 174, 186n17; Cymochles, 199–200; Dwarf, 254; Errour, 209, 224, 234n19, 254; Gloriana, 194; Guyon, 191, 193, 194, 204; Hellenore and Malbecco, 204–5; House of Pride, 128; lust in, 6, 188, 191, 193, 195, 198–200, 202–7; Malecasta, 203–4, 205; Paridell, 204, 207; Radigund, 204; Redcrosse Knight, 182, 193, 194, 224, 254; Serena and the cannibals, 186n22; Squire of Dames, 177; tapestries in House of Busirane, 188, 191, 193, 194; Una, 183, 254; Venus and Adonis, 202–3 Spiller, Elizabeth; “Reading through Galileo’s Telescope,” 82n11 Steadman, John, 254 Steiner, George, 111n1 Stow, John, 95 Strong, Roy: Art and Power, 116n44 sublime, the, 24, 25 Susskind, Lenny, 258, 264n37 Swearingen, C. Jan: Rhetoric and Irony, 55n15 Swift, Jonathan: Gulliver’s Travels, 19 symbol vs. allegory, 2, 23, 24, 208–9 synecdoche, 44–45 Szczeklik, Andrzej: Catharsis, 57n27 Talbott, Jack, 56n23 Tasso, Torquato, 2; Galileo on, 68–69; Jerusalem Delivered/Jerusalem Conquered, 21, 68, 69 Tate, Nahum: Dido and Aeneas, 93, 105–11 Teofilo and allegory, 75 Teskey, Gordon: Allegory and Violence, 4, 5, 124, 131, 140n1, 164–65; on Dante’s Francesca da Rimini, 168–69, 170, 183; on female gender of personifications, 164–65, 166–69, 171, 173, 179, 183, 185, 186n16; on Spenser’s Amoret, 164–65, 166–68, 173–74 Thomson, J. S., 257 Tieck, Ludwig, 24–25 Tiepolo, Giambattista, 130 time and printing, 155–56 Titian: Venus and Adonis, 202 Tolstoy, Leo: Anna Karenina, 16

275

Turner, Victor, 28; From Ritual to Theatre, 55n8, 112n15; on social dramas and theatrical dramas, 90–91 Tuve, Rosemond, 254 Tye, Michael: The Imagery Debate, 81n7 United States: death penalty in, 48, 49; hanging in effigy in, 47; infanticide in, 48–49; lynching in, 54n1; the media in, 48, 49–50; Right-to-Lifers in, 48 Vallois, Thirza: Around and about Paris, 139n Van Dyck, Anthony: Rinaldo and Armida, 200 Van Gennep, Arnold: on death rituals, 94 Venus and the Lover, 102 Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 136 Versailles, 150, 151 Vesalius, Andreas: De Humani Corporis Fabrica, 97 Vickers, Nancy, 187n22 Vico, Giovanni Battista, 211 Virgil, 194, 216; Aeneid, 68–69, 105, 264n39; and Dante, 11, 167, 170, 172 Visitatio sepulchri, 46 Voltaire, 154 Warburg, Aby: on Pathosformeln, 97, 100 Webster, Charles: The Great Instauration, 232n3 Webster, John: Ferdinand in Duchess of Malfi, 186n21 White, Hayden, 238; Metahistory, 56n15 Whitman, Jon, 13 William of Ockham, 15; nominalism of, 3, 17–18, 19, 25, 29, 30, 32; and the Papacy, 29 Witness to the Execution, 48 Witte, Bernd, 111n1 Witten, Edward, 264n37; M-theory of, 258 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 19, 33n8 Wordsworth, William: “Tintern Abbey,” 16 Wroth, Mary: vs. Christine de Pizan, 5, 165–66, 184–85; and female agency, 165–66, 181, 183, 184–85; as imitating Don Quixote, 166, 183–84; relationship with Herbert, 175, 176, 181, 186n19; rewriting of Ovid by, 179; rewriting of Sidney by, 177; rewriting of Spenser by, 165–66, 175–85, 181 Wroth’s Urania, 3; Amphilanthus, 175, 176, 179, 180–83, 184; Constancy, 177,

276

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Wroth’s Urania (continued) 179–81, 183, 184, 185; Hell of deceit, 181–82; Lindamira, 187n23; Lucenia, 175–76, 184; Musalina, 175–76, 181, 184; palace of Venus on Cyprus, 177–79; Pamphilia, 175, 176–84; Tower of Love, 182–83; Urania, 180–81, 183

Yates, Andrea, 48–49 Yates, Frances: The Art of Memory, 56n17 Yates, Francis, 74, 85nn44,45 Youk, Thomas, 49 Young, Harvey, 54n1 Zemeckis, Robert: Back to the Future, 55n12 Zerilli, Linda, 248n7